Every week, on a Wednesday, I get the ‘pink’ Weekend Financial Times and I open it first to the culture section. That’s where I found a review of this book. What first attracted me was the mention by the reviewer, Michael Arditti, of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, a favourite of mine, although now he is very much out of fashion. I am always interested in novels that include real writers as characters (biographical fiction). My favourites of the genre are Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and David Lodge’s Author Author (2004) both about Henry James and his failed attempt to become a playwright, as well as Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014) about E. M. Forster and his life leading up to the publication of his masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924).
I was also prompted to read this book because its author, Tan Twan Eng, was on the Booker Prize short list in 2012 for his second novel The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). Reading a Booker Prize short listed writer has sometimes proved far more satisfying than reading the winner.
The House of Doors (2023) is the story of Lesley Hamlyn, her husband, Robert, a successful lawyer in the Straits Settlement on Penang Island (the author’s birthplace) in 1921 and her affair with a local doctor; they meet in a large house where her lover keeps his collection of doors, hanging from the ceiling. Its’s a beautiful image and a symbol of the possibilities for all Tan’s characters. The Hamlyn home, Cassowary House, is the focal point of the local society and passing through are Dr Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary seeking money and support to transform his country, and the British author, W. Somerset Maugham, an old friend of Robert’s, and Maugham’s ‘secretary’ – read ‘lover’ – Gerald Haxton who are guests in the house.
At the same time Lesley’s best friend Ethel Proudlock, living in Kuala Lumpur, is accused of murder and Lesley becomes involved in emotionally supporting her friend even though Ethel has admitted to the crime; she emptied a pistol of its six bullets into the body and head of a man on her verandah one night.
This famous case was the subject of world news and became the basis of one of Maugham’s most famous stories: The Letter, which first appeared in his short story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926) and became a very successful stage play in 1927 and, even more famously, a Hollywood movie in 1940 starring Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall.
Most reviews concentrate on the Maugham element in their reviews but the book is a lot more than that: revolution in China, the colonial way of life, and fidelity. The later is particularly strong since Lesley’s affaire weighs heavily on her conscience even though she knows her husband is having his own. Her conservative social sensibilities, brought into focus when she finally realises the true relationship between Maugham and Haxton, and the effect on her marriage and on the society in which she lives, should the affair be discovered, create a dilemma for the woman but her sense of her own worth wins through. She is very careful and maintains her marriage, family, and social position while at the same time quite enjoying Maugham’s company. W. Somerset Maugham was not a very likeable person, but Tan portrays him as a kind and soft man, if somewhat aloof, but completely in the thrall of Gerald Haxton.
Tan uses an anonymous omnipotent third person narrator interspersed with the first person, Lesley Hamblyn, which gives the work a stronger verisimilitude had it been completely told in the third. Tan has also moved the action of some of the true events to meet his novelistic needs as well as successfully mingling real and fictional characters in a known place juxtaposing the political and the romantic, against the suspense of a murder trial and the whispered prejudices of the British society sipping their G&Ts while sweltering in their linens.
Tan is completely in control of his material and ideas. It is a very enjoyable and satisfying read.
Here you can watch a short video of Tan Twan Eng talking about The House of Doors.
You can buy the book in various formats here.
Michael K Freundt 