BookBrowse Reviews The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

BookBrowse:

This novel reimagines the events surrounding the 1921 visit by writer W. Somerset Maugham to friends in Penang, Malaysia, which would inspire his book of short stories The Casuarina Tree.

Every July, I take on the overly ambitious goal of reading all of the novels chosen as longlist finalists for the celebrated Booker Prize award, and every year I fail miserably. This year, of the seven novels that I read (out of thirteen), six involved traumatized children as central characters. Reading these books in quick succession made for some harrowing hours. The welcome exception to this thematic run was The House of Doors by Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng. Set on the island of Penang, Malaysia, in the early years of the twentieth century, the novel directs the reader with grace and humor to the contradictions lurking beneath the ice of Victorian convention in British high-colonial society. This may sound familiar to readers of the English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), who, fittingly, shows up as one of this novel's main characters, but Twan Eng introduces a contemporary, nuanced take on the psychological complexity of the period.

The central narrative follows Maugham (here called Willie) on his visit to Penang in 1921 with his secretary and romantic partner Gerald Haxton. The two stay with old friends Lesley and Robert Hamlyn. Over the course of several evenings, Lesley shares with Willie intimate stories about her life in Penang a decade earlier. Her account involves a friend's murder trial, extramarital affairs, and her political work for the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (see Beyond the Book), who had based his campaign in the British colony to raise funds for the revolution that by year's end would make him the first president of the new Republic of China. Lesley well understands that by sharing with Willie these significant and revealing details of her life she is tacitly accepting that they might one day become public. As Robert reminds her, "He's my friend, but he's also a writer, and there's nothing he loves more than snuffling out people's scandals and secrets." And, indeed, in this story, Willie eventually does incorporate some elements of Lesley's stories—such as the murder trial she recounts—into his fiction.

The upper altitude of early-twentieth century British colonial society on Penang provides the milieu for Twan Eng's novel. Social conventions are sacrosanct, and even transgressors do anything in their power to uphold the social contract. Willie maintains the façade of a straight man in a happy marriage so that he can travel freely with his male companion. Lesley and Robert struggle to sustain their own fiction of an idyllic married life, while each seeks solace in publicly unacceptable partnerships; their fear of exposure safeguards their union's bond. Lesley's friend Ethel chooses to risk being branded a murderess rather than admit to an adulterous affair. Thus, many of the British characters lead double lives, adhering to strict societal mores while simultaneously contravening them. But this same leeway is not afforded to others, and at the margins of Penang's white mischief, the serious work of Sun Yat-sen's revolution moves forward.

In writing The House of Doors, Twan Eng effectively reverse engineers the work of the real-life Maugham, using his book of short stories The Casuarina Tree to envision a context within which the author might have been sparked to create his fiction. In so doing, Twan Eng crafts a novel that has much to say about the very art of narrative crafting, and structurally functions as something of an infinity mirror held up to a repeating interplay between fiction and nonfiction.

The intertwined voices and time periods make the plot gallop along, and I enjoyed the way the narrative dips in and out of true biographical detail and imagined fictional detail. In plot and execution, the novel reminds us that fiction writers are magpies who collect the materials that support their vision, discarding elements that they assign less importance, even when these elements are the very things that others commit their lives to.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in November 2023, and has been updated for the October 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.