Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester

John Lanchester is one of the many authors I have been led to through the pages of Granta, and on the back of ‘Fragrant Harbour’ we can find a bit of blurb from Granta’s current editor praising the merits of Lanchester and his book.

And this is what I would like to discuss here: the back of the book.

Most of us, before ever entering into the realms of the book itself, will read the back of the book where we inevitably find a few complementary quotes from literati and a plot/theme synopsis. All of this is bound to affect our reading in one way or another, from as facile an issue as whether you choose to read the book at all, to the complexities of how it changes our expectations and opinions of the book. If, say, a quote from someone I respect, such as D.J. Taylor or John Carey, appears on the back of a book I am a lot more likely to have a good opinion of it than if a quote from someone I find less eminent, say David Baddiel, appears there.

This is all fairly obvious of course, but how can the plot/theme synopsis contribute to or even ruin our reading?

First of all, we must consider what its function is. Is it there to provide us with a short guide to the book, to help us decide whether we want to read it or not, or is it actually there to tell us how to read? I can think of instances when I have read books that, according to the blurb, provide something along the lines of ‘an explosion of today’s big issues’ or ‘an insight into the collision that takes place when misogyny and philanthropy meet’, only to be left at the end flicking back through the pages for anything akin to the contents promoted on the back.

And how conscious are we of the back page blurb when reading? If we didn’t know the themes mentioned there were supposed to be in the book, would we be able to detect them at all?

To move to the less ambiguous field of plot, is it not spoilt by the revelations on the back? To take Lanchester’s book, which unfortunately I do not have to hand as I left my copy in another country, the lives of two characters, Tom Stewart and Matthew Ho are pretty well exposed on the back page, which, considering that the structure of the book is meant to bring Matthew in very late as the ‘surprise’ grandson of Tom, meant that I was sitting there for 250 pages waiting for Matthew to appear, only to have 90% guessed who he was going to be by the time he appeared. Without the blurb, I wouldn’t have known about Matthew’s existence, and thus the hectic, interwoven Hong Kong life that the author is trying to portray would have had a much more authentic feel to it.

It is not that I am a plot-driven reader, in fact I am vehemently anti-plot in many respects, seeing it as the realm of crime writers and such; and while the literature I like inevitably has a plot, I would never read a book on the basis of its plot, rather on the basis of its themes or its author.

However, in the case of Fragrant Harbour’s, the plot is very much the theme, and vice versa, meaning that the blurb blows the whole structure of the book to smithereens and renders it flaccid and predictable in the process.