SOURCE: Mirsky, Jonathan. “Travelling without Making Progress.” Spectator 286, no. 9012 (28 April 2001): 38–39.

In the following negative review, Mirsky criticizes the plot, characterization, and dialogue of Hotel Honolulu.

In 1997 Paul Theroux published Kowloon Tong, a novel many readers in the colony disliked for precisely the reason I liked it very much. A good thriller, it caught the feeling of Hong Kong exactly, including many of the characteristics of those who lived there—Cantonese, Filipinos, British—which made some readers accuse Theroux of stereotyping, more specifically of racism or Anglophobia. I thought he got everyone just right, neither fairly nor meanly, although fairness is not a quality we expect of a novel. There was no message, no discernible attitude, just a light but effective narrative about people in their different but interlocking worlds. Theroux transformed eating chicken feet, consumed in their tens of thousands every day in Hong Kong, into the actions...