“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post
Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post’s man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel.
First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston’s “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise.
Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt.
