With Mr Hung in new Hong Kong

WHEN formally announced in 1984 by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the British handover of Hong Kong to China seemed a far distant date in a slightly frightening place called the future. That future has become now, and Paul Theroux's sharp, timely new novel, Kowloon Tong (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK), looks not only at the handover, but at the colonial society Britain's occupation created as well as the unpleasant colonists who, while making the most of their life there, never forget their dislike of the native population.

Neville "Bunt" Mullard and his ghastly mother Betty represent the worst aspects of the smug, mean minded colonial who is none too interested in the forthcoming political developments, or, as Betty calls it, "the Chinese Takeaway".

They are unintelligent snobs commercially controlling their very own little England, thousands of miles away from the Mother Country, supporting a class hierarchy from which they themselves, in Britain, would be excluded. The Mullards continue to live off the success of the textile factory, Imperial Stitching, cofounded by George, Betty's long deceased husband. Meanwhile, just as the foreigners exploit the natives, Betty has usurped her son Neville's life.

Now 43, Neville continues to live with her. It is as if they were married to each other, complete with petty domestic rituals. Theroux stresses Bunt's paranoid resentment of natives who speak good English: "The fluent English speakers in Hong Kong were always the most slippery. They were the least trustworthy . . . their good English meant that they had been educated elsewhere . . . Bunt liked the locals and their goofy speech - graduates of Hong Kong schools seldom spoke English well, and as a result it kept the class system intact."

Nor has Neville any interest in the culture of the world he inhabits, despite having been born there: "The city was no more real to him than the signs, which he could not read, the Cantonese language which was just a grating noise that did not remotely resemble human speech." The vulgar Betty, still irredeemably from Balham despite half a century's Hong Kong residence, bluntly refers to the locals as "Chinky Chonks", while refusing to eat Chinese food: "Never did. All the grease, all the glue. And it's always so wet. Makes me want to spew."

Theroux can afford to present his central characters as philistines because as an experienced travel writer he adeptly creates a vivid portrait of Hong Kong as an impatient city busily alive: shouting, eating, scheming. The people themselves are assessed in Bunt's subconscious with a relentless astuteness far more characteristic of Theroux's unforgiving gaze than of his fictional character's half hearted perceptions: "Whoever said the Chinese were enigmatic might have met one Chinese person but had not met two. They were nearly always the opposite - obvious, unsubtle, unambiguous, and what was the opposite of mysterious? They carried on their lives in whispers and their business in shouts."

Aside from the topicality of Kowloon Tong and its clever balancing of cultural stereotypes and its portrait of the cultural dislocation which occurs in colonisedcentres of mass population for this last, Bunt, in one of his less selfabsorbed interludes, blames Hong Kong, "the way it cut off people's roots and made them selfish and sneering and greedy and spineless, even his own mother" this novel liberates Theroux the novelist from, a theme which has been dominating his work: himself.

Novels such as My Secret History (1989) and My Other Life (1996), confessional excursions into the darker aspects of sexuality, walk a tightrope between autobiography and fiction, between truth and invention. Though often fascinating, these exposing narratives present Theroux at a crisis point where reportage had been supplanted by his personal struggles with life, ego and writing. Theroux's prose always has an efficient exactness, even when the tone is at its most irritatedly, irritatingly dismissive and cold.

This most unAmerican of American writers at his best displays a formidable and extraordinarily diverse talent. There is always a tension in him between the storyteller and the observer, the novelist and the travel writer. Theroux's powers of clinical observation have served his fiction well, and seldom better than here: for example, when he describes Mr Hung, the villain determined to buy Imperial Stitching, poking the buttons on his phone "in a hard, destructive way, as though putting out its eyes".

Hung's characterisation goes beyond caricature. Representing the new face of the formerly oppressed turned oppressor, Hung is pictured at a supper which he bullies the reluctant Bunt into attending. The Chinese man "went on cramming the chicken foot into his mouth, finishing it off with his teeth. He spat a knuckle of gristle onto his plate . . . his face was so contorted by his chewing that he seemed to have no eyes. Leaning towards a terrified young woman, whom he will kill later that night, cleverly leaving no trace, Hung says: "I want to eat your foot"

and perhaps he does, as no evidence is found.

The emergence of Hung as an insultingly well spoken menace carrying the threat of moral exposure as well as commercial oblivion for Bunt also gives a hard edge to a novel which could have been little more than a cleverly satirical morality play about colonialism finally backfiring on the coloniser. Through Hung, Bunt also discovers the ancient anger and resentments which have sustained his mother as a widow who has never forgotten she was a betrayed wife. This is paralleled by Bunt eventually realising, if not altogether convincingly, that he in fact loves the young factory worker he has been using for recreational sex. The tenderness here, so untypical of Theroux, whose approach to sex tends towards the obsessive rather than romantic, adds an interesting, almost appealing dimension to Bunt's suppressed personality.

Kowloon Tong is a strong performance from a prolific, versatile writer still capable of surprises.