SOURCE: Mirsky, Jonathan. “Handing It Over—and Afterwards.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4908 (25 April 1997): 22.

In the following positive review, Mirsky praises Theroux's attention to sensual details in Kowloon Tong.

Joseph Conrad said his “task” was “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you see.” In Kowloon Tong, his latest novel, Paul Theroux uses both his sets of eyes—the travel writer's and the novelist's—to apply himself to Conrad's great task. The setting is Hong Kong, a year before what the hero's mother refers to as “the Chinese Take-away” on July 1, 1997.

Theroux can turn something which is ordinary in Hong Kong, such as eating the steamed chicken feet devoured in their tens of thousands every day, into the actions of a torturer. Mr Hung, who probably is exactly that, and is certainly a murderer, “went...