Lanchester was immediately recognised as a great talent with the appearance of The Debt to Pleasure, which won him the Whitbread First Novel award in 1996.
Hence the feelings of complicit elation Lanchester is able to foment in his readers as he approaches the end of The Debt to Pleasure, so different from the flatness of the close of Mr Phillips (whose ending should, after all, properly be optimistic).
With his first two novels, JohnLanchester established himself as a writer whose focus on one man's interior landscape was, in each case, a tour de force.
As a child, Lanchester was aware of his grandmother's visits to the cemetery, honoring the graves of people who died in the battle for Hong Kong or during their incarceration afterwards.
Lanchester's voice is clearly a marvel of ingenuity, wit and narrative verve.
In that novel Lanchester showed himself to be a very brave man because Mr Phillips is a consummately dull man, a sort of John Major with no Edwina Currie.
It is dotted with a Lanchester trademark, a series of lists, which is cute the first time but not a winning way the second and third time.
That said, one must be fair to Lanchester and concede that, for the most part, Stewart's tale is well told, although the twist in the tail comes hardly as a shock.
Lanchester's previous novels were witty and stylish, but they were also too cold and cerebral, underscored as they were by a young man's hauteur and desire to impress.
Lanchester spent much of his childhood and adolescence there and he writes elegiacally about the lost colony, conjuring up an image of a hazy, enchanted place that, no matter how much debased by commerce and crime, remains even today commensurate with our capacity for wonder.
Lanchester seems somehow to have decided it was time for him to produce a work of what is sometimes regarded as "epic" scope - it covers many years, contains a nasty war, and despite the mass of detail is never quite plausible.
Amazon.com: Fragrant Harbor: Books: John Lanchester(Site not responding. Last check: )
Lanchester was raised in Hong Kong (his grandparents had settled there in the 1930s and been interned by the Japanese during the war), and his insider view of the place is about as far from the small, lyrical Western-Asian novels of recent years as can be imagined.
Lanchester steeps the narrative in vivid detail (having been raised in Hong Kong, he is intimately acquainted with the city), and the subtheme of money and its ultimate power over human destiny permeates the story.
JohnLanchester's Fragrant Harbor adopts more complexity and formality in comparison to his two previous novels, the painfully humorous and opinionated The Debt to Pleasure and the satirical Mr.
JohnLanchester's first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, delighted gourmets and others - the former because its principal character is a disciple of Brillat Savarin, devoted to gustatory ecstasy as a good man might be devoted to virtue, the latter just for the jokes.
Lanchester has to imagine what Hong Kong and the Stanley camp were like in those years.
Lanchester seems somehow to have decided it was time for him to produce a work of what is sometimes regarded as "epic" scope - it covers many years, contains a nasty war, and despite the mass of detail is never quite plausible.
Lanchester's study in surprise and irony spans 70 years in the history of Hong Kong, flipping back and forth through the decades.
A former resident of Hong Kong, Lanchester knows the place down to its narrowest alley and doesn't hesitate to paint his scenes to the smallest detail.
What Lanchester has given us is a powerful remembrance of a time and place almost unknown in America today.
Lanchester has set himself the stern challenge of making a resolutely ordinary mind interesting without sliding into sentimentality -- of steering his creation closer to Mrs.
Phillips is a bit of a disappointing fall to earth after the florid erudition and charming self-deceptions of Tarquin Winot, the gourmand narrator of Lanchester's ravishing debut novel, ''The Debt to Pleasure'' (1996).
Victor Phillips (Lanchester lets his first name slip, flashing like a carefully hidden piece of skin) wears his banality a bit too heavily, like a thick worsted wool suit on an airless summer day.
Lanchester intertwines personal histories and the city's history with great skill, showing how the past lives on, even in a city as resolutely modern as Hong Kong.
Lanchester's literary conceit attempts to dothis through three characters, each with their own distinct voice but withintertwined stories.
I had never read one of JohnLanchester's books before, but was attracted to 'Fragrant Harbour' as it had Hong Kong at the centre of the novel.
JohnLanchester has performed tortuous literary acrobatics to escape this dictum.
What he has used from his previous incarnation as a literary and restaurant critic is a finely tuned sense of literary dos and don'ts, and an encyclopedic tour of world gastronomy.
For the literary type, Lanchester's malevolent and self-deluded protagonist, Tarquin, is a satisfactorily deceitful and menacing guide through a psychopath's life and relationships.
Instead, when you read Lanchester, you enter a realm of mystification and evasion: if his narrators are not fiendishly unreliable, they are naively self-deceiving, unsure of themselves and of their place in the world.
In Fragrant Harbour, Lanchester has once more opted for pastiche and imitation, in that he uses three distinct narrators to tell the story of Hong Kong in the twentieth century, each of whom has his or her own convincing, delineated voice and idiom.
Lanchester takes a considerable risk in choosing Stone as a narrator, because she writes energetically but without any real distinction of phrase or insight, in a kind of smart, wised-up journalese that is so popular today with certain female columnists and which Lanchester spoofs expertly, but for rather too long.
Lanchester begins his book with the words, "This is not a conventional cookbook...."
In his debut novel, Lanchester, an editor and former restaurant reviewer for the London Observer, has put together a fascinating portrait of a man driven by corresponding passions for food and a bizarre philosophy of art that reveres absence over the creation of something new.
This is Lanchester's first novel, and a promising beginning it is.
Salon Books | "Mr Phillips" by John Lanchester(Site not responding. Last check: )
JohnLanchester's new novel, "Mr Phillips," is all about an accountant called Mr.
Such tidy tastes should serve as a warning that we are not about to get a second helping of "The Debt to Pleasure," Lanchester's first novel, a flamboyant Nabokovian pastiche that dined out on a svelte mixture of dark deeds and exquisite epicureanism.
Phillips is about as epicurean as a paper clip, and his life is a catalog of pleasures deferred, remembered or wholly imagined.
Para celebrarlo, me pareció interesante rescatar en esta ocasión una espléndida reseña de JohnLanchester de la primera novela de la autora británica de origen jamaiquino, White Teeth (Dientes blancos), traducida a una veintena de idiomas y que le valió el reconocimiento internacional.
En primer lugar, la lectura política del libro realizada por JohnLanchester, un novelista de mérito por su parte, y en segundo por la actualidad que representa la perspectiva de Smith en un momento en el cual España comienza a plantearse las mismas cuestiones que la autora convoca en su novela.
Reflejando una de las preocupaciones centrales de la obra narrativa del norteamericano, la novela, publicada en 1988, explora con sobrecogedora lucidez las complejas relaciones entre ficción e historia.
John le Carré's story about the Swiss, money, and democracy and about our own unbearable peace.
John Berger, Milan Kundera, Orville Schell, Anita Brookner, James Fenton, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis, and Edward Said.
John Hawkes, William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Leonard Michaels, Donald Barthelme, James Purdy, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Elkin, Susan Sontag, Ronald Sukenick.
Edited by William S. Burroughs, this edition of Granta features selections on the joys (or perils) of food by writers ancient and contemporary, including Dante, Kafka, William Cowper, JohnLanchester, Graham Swift, and Cornell Woolrich.
Ranging from Victorian England to the post-Cold War world, these 19 tales of mayhem and missions behind enemy lines delve into themes of betrayal, revenge, and treachery.
Also Joan Smith, Amartya Sen, Norman Lewis, Romesh Gunesekera, Jane Rogers, Margaret Visser, Giles Foden, J. Coetzee andamp; JohnLanchester.
