Tag: book review

Friendly Fire by Patrick Gale

British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall

In my attempt to find and read all of Patrick’s fiction works – only a few to go – I’ve hit some barriers: some of works are not easy to find. This one, Friendly Fire (2005), has been elusive but I discovered it on my sister’s bookshelf; she found it in a second-hand bookshop.

Sophie is fourteen, an orphan, and in a home, Wakefield House, not the horrible cliched narrative of harsh and sadistic masters in an old grey and foreboding stone mansion, but a warm and caring environment run by a childless couple, Margaret and Keiran, who although they keep their emotional distance from the children who might on any day be adopted they have formed a much closer bond with Sophie who has never sought to leave. According to Gale, “her life is changed through literature.” She is a bright student, even-tempered, and curious and earns a place at a much admired boarding school, Tatham, where she is attracted to and befriends two male students, Lucas Behrman and Charlie Somborne-Abbot. Their developing lives, friendships, sexualities, and their place in the world, home and away, form the book’s narrative. The boarding school trope has been used countless times as a metaphor for society, politics, nations, and even the world. Here it feels more like a family, a benign and nurturing one, but like every family there is unexpected tragedy. Learning doesn’t only happen at school.

Society’s rules, inconsistencies, trivialities, secrets, prejudices, both religious and financial, and, of course, hypocrisies make up the steeplechase that Sophie must navigate, jumping and sidestepping, calling for help, or facing head on, but also falling splat! on her face. Gale is an expert at pacing and plotting; his plot points, both soft and dramatic, sometimes sneak up on you. The climactic moment is dropped into a seemingly casual sentence in such an unassuming way that I had to stop and re-read it to make sure I had read what I thought I had. As a reader I felt buffeted by the narrative but at the same time confident that I was in safe and expert hands. That’s what I like about Gale’s work and why I’m seeking to read everything he has written, and will write.

You can buy the Kindle or paperback edition here.

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The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

Irish writer Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan’s 6th novel, The Queen of Dirt Island (2022) is a novel of very short chapters. All of them are short-titled and just shy of 2 pages. I would describe myself as a tough reader: it takes a lot to stir my emotions. Yet, chapter one at just one and three-quarter pages, moved me greatly. I read it four times. Of course, the emotion faded with familiarity but Ryan’s skill and control was always evident.

It’s like flicking through a family album picking up tit-bits that put the snaps into a semblance of order and understanding that becomes a narrative.

It’s the story of Saoirse (SER sha) Alyward raised by her mother, Eileen, and Nana, Mary, Eileen’s mother-in-law. Everyone speaks, adults and children, in a basic Irish rural lexicon with a heavy sprinkling of foul language at ease with the many Catholic idioms and easy blasphemy, illuminating the rural mind, more fearful of the weather than of god. They call themselves a family

…all sort of humming along in that comfortable dysfunction that seems to be the best any family can hope for…

but one that is treated with suspicion and contempt: there’s no man in the house. Saoirse had never felt afraid until at the age of fourteen years and nine months when an officious social worker asked her gossip-based leading questions about her mother’s integrity.

Her situation is slowly revealed: poverty, her mother’s privileged but outraged and aloof family, as well as her hardening personality to match the life that treacherous circumstances have chosen for her. It’s a story of husband-less and father-less women surviving in a land of patriarchal power but manage to create their own womanised niche while, at the same time, having to deal with feckless men blind to their own weaknesses.

Ryan describes writing as “burgeoning visions”. One of my gripes is that a few plot points, few ‘visions’, feel as if they’ve emanated from the writer’s universe and squeezed to fit into the story’s universe. For example, the sudden desire of Josh, Saoirse’s ill-matched boyfriend, to be a novelist and write Saoirse’s story,

…to make a record, he said … all of these things that happened, all of these dramas, all of these shades of declension between love and its absence, between living and dying, between love and hate…to sublimate all of this life into art…

the product of which she rejects and writes her own. It is, of course, a success. It’s a petty complaint and thankfully doesn’t distract from the excellence of the writing and the engaging characters and their story. But it could be seen as a metaphor for the resilience of women which makes it less of a complaint and more of a novelistic device.

Donal Ryan is one of many Irish writers that are part of what Sebastian Barry, the current Irish Laureate for Fiction, calls the ‘golden age’ of Irish writing. Writers like, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Paul Murray, Elaine Feeney, Claire Keegan, Barry himself, all much loved and awarded, and Paul Lynch who on November 26th was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his 5th novel Prophet Song.

If you like Irish writing please, if you haven’t already, add Donal Ryan to your list.

Here you can read my blog about Ryan’s 4th novel from a low and quiet sea (2018)

You can hear Donal Ryan talking about The Queen of Dirt Island here.

You can buy the book is various formats here.

 

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The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Irish writer, Anne Enright, won the 2007 Booker Prize and the 2008 Irish Book of the Year for her third novel The Gathering.

Conversation is very different to writing. Conversation, saying what you mean, incorporates a lot of facial expressions, body language, shared history, and – most importantly – tone. Writing has none of that unless the writer uses more words to incorporate all that conversational stuff. Hence writing takes more words to get across everything conversation can do with less.

The first chapter of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (2023) is written conversationally without all that wordy conversational stuff. She creates this conversational tone not with words but with a lack of words and with a creative attitude to punctuation and line length. For the reader, this takes a little getting used to; don’t give up if you think you might. You just need to exercise more readerly skills and your wish to know will show you what you need to do. It doesn’t take long. 

Does he love me
Is that him
Waiting for this man is better than being with him, it was certainly more intense, the way longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing. And nothing, but nothing was better than that first flash of arrival.
He loves me
There he is

This format has a subtle purpose: it prepares you for what this story is about: a poem. Or, more specifically, the shadow of its poet.

The first person narrator of the first chapter, NELL, is a young woman in thrall to the love of a man. See above. She’s young. Carmel is her mother and is the focus of the second chapter, CARMEL. She is older, of course, and so is the chapter’s format, more conventional, like Carmel who is the daughter of the poet Philip McDaragh, the writer of the poem, The Wren, The Wren.

Enright has a knack with language and uses her prose to characterise her creations. In her novel, The Green Road, one of her characters is a gay man living in Greenwich Village in New York. Her prose when dealing with him tells you far more about the character than what he says or does. Similarly here, Nell’s chapters, in their language and layout, reflect the character of Nell, modern, texting, informal, and peripatetic. Carmel’s chapters are more conventional, familiar, grounded, and mature.

Anne Enright is a writer of family. Her Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering (2007) is about a gathering of a family after a death in it. Her better book, The Green Road (2015) is about the gathering of a family after their prickly mother has decided to sell the farm. The Forgotten Waltz (2011) is a slight departure in that it’s about lust told through the eyes of ‘the other woman’, while Actress (2020) is about a mother-daughter relationship that also includes, fractiously, the mother’s career vs the mother role.

This is a novel without a narrative arc. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a story; there are many stories, particularly Nell’s and Carmel’s. Philip McDaragh left is wife and two young daughters, the youngest Carmel, and became a famous poet. The women, including Carmel’s daughter Nell – who never met her grandfather – would see him on television in a bar or YouTube clips on their phones and see a man strangely known to them but who now they must share with thousands of others and think how unfair that is. The shadow of Philip McGaragh follows these women all their lives and certainly colours Nell’s relationships with men.

Men (most) leave their families, even if they stay at home. Or am I, the reader, bringing my own meaning to this work? Readers can and should bring something to other people’s fiction. If my own father had lived long and past my 5th birthday I would be a very different person to the man I am now.

I loved this book not just because it is so different but because, even if the action is soft, the sentences, most of them, spark your interest simply because of the words she uses. I’ve searched and found many examples but showing them to you out of context doesn’t do them justice.

You’ll have to read it yourself to know what I mean.

It’s entertaining on many levels, a true work of art, a literary novel that you can easily enjoy again and again because there isn’t a plot to forget.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here you can watch the Waterstones Interview with Anne Enright about this new novel.

by Categories: Irish literature, Literary criticism, poetryTags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Scenes From a Childhood by Jon Fosse

Norwegian writer, Jon Fosse, winner – finally – of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2023.

Scenes from a Childhood (1994) by Jon Fosse is a collection of short stories, vaguely connected. He has had works published since 1983, established himself in the theatre as the most -performed living European playwright but after 30 something plays returned to fiction because it gave him more freedom. But has since continued to write for the theatre.

He is known for ‘slow fiction’ characterised by simple language and the minutiae of existence. (An online fiction writing guru argues that if you think your prose is becoming boring, don’t speed up, slow down) Scenes from a Childhood is the title of one of the five sections and its just that. Some are very short, just a line, others are longer, but they give the impression of flicking through a photo album.

The shortest is called The Axe:

One day Father yells at him and he goes out to the woodshed, he gets the biggest axe, he carries it into the living room and puts it down next to his father’s chair and asks his father to kill him. As one night expect, this only makes his father angrier.

And Then My Dog Will Come Back to Me is a much longer story, section four. A man is so incensed that a neighbour of his has shot his dog that he plans a murder. Here the prose, first person, present tense, is made up of short sharp sentences in something close to stream of consciousness that is almost breathless to read. You are forced to read as fast as the man’s thoughts come and go. Punctuation is minimal. Dialogue is incorporated into the prose only delineated by line length. But very clear. This forced rushing has the affect of creating tension, suspense even, as his thinking becomes more and more erratic, confused but determined. Will he go through with it? Does he understand the consequences? Will his plans be thwarted? No spoilers here.

It could’ve been written with no punctuation at all like his novel Septology (2022), considered for the International Booker Prize, is reported to be, all 824 pages of it. Let’s be clear here, no matter how long a sentence is, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a book, there are of course many sentences in the true meaning of the word, just no full stops. If the writer has left them out, us readers put them in. Don’t be afraid of ‘no punctuation’. When we read prose aloud we don’t ‘read’ the punctuation yet it is clear to the listener when one sentence finishes and another begins. So it can be for the reader.

Fosse is a fascinating man. He writes in Nynorsk, a Norwegian dialect from the west coast around Bergen where he was born in 1959. He lives most of the time in the Grotten, an honorary residence in the grounds of the Norwegian Royal Palace, in recognition of his contribution to the arts and literature. Once an atheist, now a catholic, since 2012, it is implied in a recent article by Chis Power in this week’s The Guardian that Fosse was so bewilded by the fiction writing process, “I wrote and I didn’t understand where it was coming from. How do I manage it? It’s coming from somewhere else,” … maybe it came from God. He tells of a mystical – religious? – experience in his youth and used it as the basis for the latest Fitzcarraldo Edition of the novella The Shining released in October this year.

You can buy the ebook or paperback here.

Here is a short video of Fosse talking about writing prose and here a longer France24 news excerpt when Fosse won the Nobel.

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Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

American writer, Ann Patchett

I never thought it was possible, but this book, Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett, is a book about happiness. Of course bad things happen, they always do, but the bad things are related from another time well after the bad things, a happy time so the reader is always aware that the bad times were overcome.

I have been criticised before for using the term ‘soft fiction’. Some people think this a derogitory phrase. Not at all. By ‘soft fiction’ I mean there are no car chases, revolutions, earthquakes, spies, murders, or zombies. Plot points are naturalistic which the general reader can relate to. Patchett writes about family and in this book she writes about family to such a naturalistic degree that it feels like memoir; the verisimilitude is so strong. It’s very very good soft fiction.

The happy family are the Nelsons. Lara and Joe, in the general present, live on a stone friut farm in northern Michigan bordering the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan to be precise. They grow cherries, apples and pears in ‘the best’ and prettiest fruit growing district near Traverse City. Their three daughters, Emily, Nell, and Maisie, are adults and home for the late summer to help with the cherry harvest. While picking cherries Lara tells her daughters about her life from High School to her mid twenties when she had a romance with a famous movie actor, Peter Duke. He wasn’t famous then, of course, but the girls want to hear the details of the mother’s story having grown up with bones of the affaire all their lives.

Lara’s story begins with the auditions for a local, New Hampshire, production of Thornton Wilder’s iconic play Our Town. Lara and Peter met in summer stock when Lara thought she wanted to be an actor; she was ‘so good’ as Emily! Circumstances led her to another procuction of Our Town at Tom Lake where Peter Duke was cast as her father, Editor Webb. Their affaire began on the day she arrived only minutes after meeting Peter Duke who told her she couldn’t meet the rest of the company that afternoon because “you’ll be busy.”

What happens at Tom Lake is at the heart of the narrative. One of the things that makes the book so interesting and intringuing is that these two narratives, the cherry picking days and the summer stock months, we know will eventually converge to produce Lara’s happy family. But of course we don’t know how.

The other successful ingredient is Ann Patchett. Her first person narrator, Lara, is a reader’s joy. It’s like she’s leaning towards you, elbows on knees, in a living room in front of the fire when everyone else has gone to bed and telling you things she would’t dare tell anybody else, especially her daughters. You are forever in her thrall and made to feel special because of it.

I liked her The Dutch House (2019) but this is so much better.

It’s the best book I’ve ever read since the last best book I ever read … which was a while ago.

When next you go to your doctor for a perscription for anti-depressants don’t be surprised if it says ‘read Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.’ It will be cheaper and more effective.

Here you can watch an interview with the wise and wonderful Ann Patchett courtesy of PBS News Hour.

You can buy the book in various formats here, where you can also read a sample for free.

-oOo-

P.S. It was very hard to find a picture of the cover of this book that didn’t look like this, the American cover:

Americans are so keen on overstatement. They don’t go horseriding, they go horseback riding, just in case you’re not sure where to sit. They don’t walk on a footpath they walk on a sidewalk, just in case you might think it’s OK to walk on the road. And they put ‘a novel’ on the cover of a novel just in case it’s a novel you really want to buy, not a cheesecake.

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Devotion by Hannah Kent

This novel is about Lutheran migrants from Prussia in the nineteenth century given the opportunity to flee religious persecution and settle in the unknown but free colony of South Australia. I was very interested in this novel as my ancestors did exactly that, as did hers. My great grandfather arrived in the colony in 1851.

Kent’s description of life in the Prussian peasantry as tenant farmers is evocative, and totally believable. The story is told in the first person by the daughter of the family, Hanne, who considers herself dull and plain; her close paternal twin brother having been blessed with all the beauty of their mother. Their life and relationships in the village of Kay is austere as is their religion with its undecorated homes, churches, and liturgy. It is indeed a dour Christian denomination, a result of Luther’s revolt against the hypocritical and outrageous wealth and flamboyance of the Roman Catholic Church. But Kent’s greatest achievement is, without actually saying it, the depiction of the Lutheran lack of demonstrative acts of parental affection, by words or deeds. It’s not that the children were unloved, but they certainly felt unloved, but were therefore forced to read and understand the minute signs of affection that, when delivered, or deduced, brought a child’s greatest joy. It is not surprising that Hanne seeks love and all its demonstrations outside the family. Yes, there is a beautiful romance, its full implications unknown to the pair, that sits in the narrative foreground in stark contrast to their bleak, and later, dangerous existence.

Their village life, the trip to the port of Hamburg and the incredibly treacherous voyage on the open ocean in appalling conditions of overcrowding and health risks is testament to Kent’s novelistic ability.

However at about two thirds of the way through, while still on board the crowded ship, and only days from their destination, Kent made a novelistic decision which, in this reader’s opinion, was a big mistake. No spoilers here but anyone who has read this book will understand what I refer to. One of the writer’s major concerns is to keep in place the reader’s suspension of disbelief: that strange mental phenomena that allows us to become fully engrossed in the written situation, the fear, the joy, the laughter, the tears, the tension, etc, or whatever the characters are going through while at the same time being fully aware, but therefore must disbelieve, that we are sitting in our reading chair by the window overlooking our own garden. At this point in the book my disbelief was restored and in more common parlance, she lost me. I didn’t finish it.

Here are personal and moving reflections from Kent about this book.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

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Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

American writer, Anne Tyler.

This is the second Anne Tyler I’ve read and again it’s about small town/suburban life that has the feeling that it was inspired by over-the-fence conversations bordering on backyard gossip.
I’m not saying her work is bad or boring, far from it. She is an excellent writer; in the USA she is a fiction super star! This work was long-listed for the Booker! Her work is inspirational and educative for writers (like me), and her particular sub-genre, ‘soft fiction’ has a huge readership, but for this reader, her concerns are all about what I recognise, have sympathy for, and have some understanding of. I want to read about what I don’t know so that I’ll then understand something I didn’t. It’s those books I prefer.

The protagonist here is Micah Mortimer, he is a freelance computer technician but he also works as a janitor for an apartment building in return for his subsidised living space in the basement. He’s a nice bloke. His non-tech-savvy, usually older, clients keep him busy, he maintains his apartment methodically – he has designated each domestic task to a day of the week – and Cass, his girlfriend – sorry, woman friend – stays over occasionally. He is the youngest sibling in his blood family and they treat him as a bit of a fastidious loner and often niggle him about still being single. But, really, he’s content with his life.

Then two things happen: Cass tells him she fears her landlord is going to evict her because she now has a pet – Micah thinks this is unlikely and humours her – and a young boy, Brink, turns up on his doorstep claiming Micah is his father. The man knows this is untrue but feels for this runaway and agrees for him to stay the night…which upsets Cass since Micah didn’t suggest she move in with him, given her potential homelessness, and now he has a stranger living with him, so she ends their relationship. Micah’s life is upended and sorting everything out, or trying to, takes him into domestic and relationship territory he’s never been before.

Let me explain my description of this work as an example of ‘soft fiction’. Micah’s relationship with Brink’s mother, some twenty odd years before, was serious but not sexual – as some relationships were in those days, so he could not be Brink’s father. Had Tyler chosen, instead, for Brink’s claim to be true, Micah’s life would be seriously upended taking this work out of my ‘soft fiction’ category and into something much ‘harder’.

Tyler’s language is simple and direct, her characters are decent, unintellectual, but rather street-wise people where family is paramount. It’s a pleasant, engaging, and quick read.

Here you can buy the book is various formats.

There are very few videos available of Anne Tyler talking about her work; I couldn’t find one relating to this book, but here is her talking about her Booker Prize short-listed novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, in 2015.

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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

British writer, Julian Barnes

This book from 2011 has been sitting on my bookshelf for some years, winking at me. I have never been sure if I had read it, so I did. In a book world dominated by thick tomes, a novella like this can be a god-send. Claire Keegan, Foster (2010) and Small Things Like These (2021), an Irish writer, has been lately championing the novella as a legitimate art form.

This is a story about memory: what we remember and what we think we remember. Tony Webster, the first person narrator, is in his latter years and he tells us about his school days when he was nerdish, oh-so clever and amusing and, with his two mates Chris and Alex, a little ahead of the pack – so they liked to think. This gives Barnes a delicious excuse for self-deprecating witticisms about his youthful behaviour as seen from the distance of his much older self.

A new boy arrives, Adrian Finn, quite a bit ahead of them in intelligence and maturity, but who attaches himself to the three friends, which surprises everyone especially the trio themselves. Flattered though they were.

Later at university, hoping that his life will soon begin, he meets the enigmatic Veronica and does all the right things, as prescribed by his conservative and very British culture, which, in reality, is nothing much, just waiting for things to happen. They don’t. However, Veronica does invite him to meet her parents, and brother Jack for a weekend. Jack, in an aside, says, ‘I suppose he’ll do.’ And that seems the belief of Veronica as well. And still nothing happens. But Veronica’s mother, quite likes him, and he quite likes her. You get the impression that she is attracted to her daughters ‘young men’.

Finally Veronica ‘comes across’ but only after they break up.

Life continues, he and his friends drift apart, he finishes university, ages, gets married, has a child, gets divorced but keeps a close relationship with his ex-wife Margaret. He then hears from Adrain Finn via a short letter that he and Veronica are now a couple. Tony is furious.

Part One concludes with the news that Adrian Finn has killed himself, diagonally slashing his wrists (apparently that is the best way to do it) in a hot bath, and left a letter explaining that his suicide was planned and philosophically justified and so no one needs to be upset. He also leaves an apologetic letter for the paramedics and hospital staff that had to deal with his corpse. Adrian Finn; first class honours, first class suicide.

Part Two opens with the elderly Tony receiving a certified package in the mail: he has inherited £500 … and a diary, but there is no diary in the the package. Astoundingly, the deceased is Sarah, Veronica’s mother, who in her accompanying letter tells Tony that Adrian, before his death, was quite happy.

This entertaining, intriguing, and very well written novel takes us through Tony’s attempts to winnow through his memory and re-engage with people he hasn’t seen in decades to answer so many bewildering unanswered questions. Why did Adrian kill himself? Why did Sarah have Adrian’s diary? Why did she leave it to Tony? (Why was it her’s in the first place?) And why won’t Veronica, still enigmatic as ever, tell him what he wants to know? What did he miss all those years ago? AND, where is the diary? Was he so stupid, so unengaged? Did his mistakes then as a young man have anything to do with his mistakes as an older one? Maybe. He was alone then; he’s alone now.

I’m sure that any reader over 50 will see themselves, to some degree, in this book. I loved it even if Barnes throws up some very unflattering mirrors at me.

And last night I watched the 2017 movie version with a stellar British cast: Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walker, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery, and Billy Howle.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

And here is a short video with Julian Barnes on The Musings of a Novelist.

by Categories: Book review, Booker Prize, British Literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The House of Special Purpose by John Boyne

John Boyne has never been shy to include historical people and events in his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh et al in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018), the Holocaust in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), and here in The House of Special Purpose (2009) where he places a fictitious character in the household of the final days of the reign of the Romanovs, in Russia, 1917/18.

However it is the adult life and love story of the fictitious character, Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev that is the focus here and dominates the narrative.

It opens in 1981 when Georgy (pronounced YOR gee) is an old man, a retired librarian in London, and his wife, Zoya, is gravely ill. Each chapter swings back and forth from Georgy’s youth as a peasant in rural Russia, the extraordinary event that puts him in the path of a bullet meant for the Tzar’s cousin, his subsequent position as bodyguard for the 11 year old Russian heir, the haemophiliac, Alexei Romanov, and his life, and love, in the Romanov household, to his life in exile after the revolution, Paris first, and his eventual settling in London working at the British Library.

It is a first person narrative in the voice of the protagonist. Of course, Georgy and his wife, suffer discrimnation and hardship, like all émigrés in post revolution and war-torn Europe, but the real drama of the work, and what stimulates the reader’s interest is that the reader, assuming they have even a modicum of knowledge of European history, knows what is going to happen to the Romanovs; Georgy, and of course the royal characters do not. This writerly format, where the reader knows more than the characters, is always a generator of novelistic tension. Here, in this work, it is intensified by the reader’s wonder at how the situation of the young Georgy, in the thrall, and in the service of the Tsar and his family, and in love with one of the Tsar’s daughters transitions to the situation of the elderly Georgy living as a retired librarian with his ill wife in London.

Of course, this is resolved, very neatly, dramatically, and believably even if Boyne uses an existing trope .. erm … but no spoilers here.

In my quest to read all the works of John Boyne, and I only have a few to go, I have yet to find one that surpasses his best – in my opinion – The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017) but this earlier work has a lot going for it: history, romance, revolution, and a fitting climax. Highly recommended.

Here you can watch John Boyne talk about, and read from, the book at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC in 2013.

And here is a shorter, but only audio, interview with Boyne about the book.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

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The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian writer, Tan Twan Eng

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. 

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