Fragrant Harbour John Lanchester Faber and Faber, 320pp, £16.99 ISBN 0571201768

''Fragrant harbour" is the literal translation of the name Hong Kong. Tom Stewart, the principal narrator of John Lanchester's new novel, has this pointed out to him by a fellow passenger as their P&O ship arrives at the colony in the late 1930s. The fellow passenger is Sister Maria, the beautiful Chinese nun who has been teaching him to speak Cantonese for a bet.

Tom sniffs the "distinct, dirty smell, too brackish to be mere seawater", and says: "That's one way of putting it." Sister Maria explains: "Chinese joke." Thomas sold his share in the family pub to seek his fortune out east. This has been a lucky voyage for him. He has struck up a lifelong friendship with Maria (though her life will be cut a little shorter than his) and his interest in learning the language wins him the admiration of the P&O captain, who gives him an introduction to the manager of the Empire Hotel. This leads to a prosperous career interrupted only by a spell in internment camp during the Japanese occupation.

Before Tom tells his life story, there is a 50-page sequence in which a pushy London journalist called Dawn Stone relates the smart career moves that brought her to a position of influence in a Hong Kong media conglomerate just before the 1997 handover. In the last part of the novel, a young air-conditioning magnate, Matthew Ho, describes a frantic present-day business trip from his new home in Sydney to Ho Chi Minh City, Guangzhou, London and Hong Kong. Matthew has to do a series of deals to save his company from receivership because corruption is costing him dear.

The connections between Dawn, Matthew and Tom take the form of plot twists that cannot be explained here. Lanchester impersonates the three characters adeptly and without altering his clean, readable style very much. Dawn's cynical personality comes across in touches of slanginess, in a fondness for brand names and in asides such as this, describing her relationship with her left-behind London boyfriend: "I mixed physical demands with occasional impatience, carping and whingeing - so attractive, don't you find?"

Dawn's essential loneliness is underlined only much later, when Matthew notices that she keeps a picture of her car, a "Mercedes SLK 320", on her desk; most people have pictures of their families. But Lanchester has subtly made this side of her nature apparent from the outset.

Tom, though solitary, is not lonely, or not that he's letting on. With the reticence of his generation, he keeps certain things back, including one rather important development that he fails to mention until 40 years after the event. His quiet but constant loyalty to Maria, to his brother back in England, to the wry hotelier Masterson, who gave him his first break, and to his wartime secret service boss, encourages the reader's affection.

When he gives English conversation classes at Maria's mission, he likes to discuss the plots of western films. The Chinese students always raise the same questions: "Where were the characters' families and why had they left them?" Tom finds this amusing and instructive, without a trace of self-pity for his own status as an expat bachelor.

Matthew is a complete family man; the in-laws share his fine house in Sydney. This sequence presents Lanchester with the biggest problem, because it takes a Chinese viewpoint, but - to a non-Chinese reader, at any rate - it seems convincing. Very little of the book has the deadening feel of research about it. The impression successfully given is that the author knows his stuff; as it happens, he grew up in Hong Kong.

Theoretically, what propels the plot is the rise of the Triad gangs from wide-boy racketeering to serious commercial power. In practice, what keeps you reading is that clear-as-springwater style, and the characterisation. Thematically and structurally, the book is inconclusive, but it certainly won't do Lanchester's considerable reputation any harm.

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