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Sheltering Rain

by Jojo Moyes

Hodder & Stoughton $128

A FORMER REPORTER for the Sunday Morning Post, Jojo Moyes' debut novel was almost lost in all this summer's fuss about another book set in Hong Kong: John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour (Faber and Faber), which tops local bookstores' best-seller lists.

Fragrant Harbour received mixed reviews: the New York Times, Observer, Economist and South China Morning Post liked it; the Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal, the Independent and Time had their doubts.

But Sheltering Rain, dismissed perhaps as trashy women's fiction, has been ignored by the American and British press.

Moyes and Lanchester are both English, and both lived in Hong Kong for a stint. Sections of Fragrant Harbour and of Sheltering Rain take place in the British colony during various stages of the 20th century, and each includes a memorable description of a sea voyage either to or from Hong Kong. The books' big-name publishers released the titles simultaneously. But that's where the similarities end.

While Fragrant Harbour's prose is eloquent and eminently readable, sections of dialogue in Sheltering Rain seem stilted. Where Lanchester barely hints at romance, instead focusing on his characters' encounters with war, organised crime and the tough world of business, Sheltering Rain is firmly in the women's fiction camp. From its pretty floral jacket with chick-lit author Lesley Pearse's endorsement, 'Very beautiful and very moving . . . I loved it', to the horsey female characters whose romantic and family relationships it explores, Moyes' debut is one for the girls.

It is, surprise, surprise, a story of three generations of women: the very proper Joy, who meets her future husband Edward at a Coronation party in Hong Kong; Kate, Joy's estranged daughter who remains unmarried at 35; and Sabine, Kate's 15-year-old daughter, who is just getting to know her grandparents for the first time.

Moyes' own grandmother, who lived in Hong Kong and Singapore in her 20s, provided much inspiration for the book. The author, who worked as a journalist at the Independent for most of the 1990s, spent a year in Hong Kong in 1994. She has two young children and lives in rural Essex, where she writes full-time. Moyes says she chose to set the novel in Hong Kong because she 'wanted a different setting to a lot of the women's fiction books that were being published in England at the time'.

Quite. The last thing the world needs is yet another book about a single girl looking for Mr Right in London, Dublin or New York.

But while the scandal that haunts this family for generations takes place in Hong Kong, only a few dozen of the book's 370 or so pages are set here.

In the opening chapter, while her friends crane their heads to hear the Coronation on the radio, Joy downs far too many tall, pink drinks and disgraces herself by throwing up from the balcony of a home on the Peak. Edward Ballantyne, a passing naval officer, comes to her assistance, and asks her father for her hand in marriage the next evening.

Later, a still naive though very pregnant Joy wonders what her husband gets up to until the early hours in Wan Chai. Her mother, who lives nearby in Robinson Road, is tempted to make announcements about 'all men being the same' and that 'those Chinese girls would get their hooks into anybody'. It's all good, page-turning stuff. In examining issues such as race, class, and why some marriages last, the storyline is also somewhat disturbing.

Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of other pages that drag on, as teenaged Sabine adjusts to life in her grandparents' rural Ireland, while her mother tries to sort out her hopeless love life back in Hackney, east London. Kate is, at least to begin with, another single woman looking for Mr Right in London. The trials of this self-centred pair are often dull. We learn nothing of Sabine's father (and the girl's claim she has no interest in meeting him seems far-fetched), of Joy and Edward's reaction to Kate's pregnancy, nor of how the young mother coped on her own in the years that followed.

At one point, as spoilt Sabine refuses to go horse riding, preferring to sulk in her room, I considered putting the book down altogether.

But I am glad I persisted. Moyes' plot is essentially a good one. The characters are well drawn and the enduring marriage between Joy and Edward, and Joy's sense of duty in the face of betrayal, are indeed, as Pearse writes, 'very moving'.



Love and betrayal make heady mix