The House of Doors

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The House Of Doors is divided in two mingled points of view, Lesley Hamlyn written in 1st person and Somerset “Willie” Maugham written in 3rd person. The two characters intersect in 1921 in Straits Settlement of Penang. Lesley lives in Cassowary House together with his husband, Robert, a lawyer and her two sons. During his Asian trip, the famous Writer Somerset Maugham, a good friend of Robert’s, decides to visit the family for three weeks. He travels together with his secretary/lover, Gerald. The way Tan Twan Eng deftly weaves in some elements of Maugham's style so that it almost sounds like a pastiche and adds some elements from Maugham's books, some of the realia, is just extraordinary. Since I've started The Casuarina Tree, a collection of Maugham's short stories set mostly in Malaysia, which inspired The House of Doors, I appreciate Tan Twan Eng's talent even more. Not just talent. How much work, time and research must have gone into this novel and, at the same time, it seems so effortless, so understated, so smooth, so subtle.

W. Somerset Maugham and his wife Syrie in the mid 1920s. I could not find a photo from Penang in 1921. This image was sourced from W. Somerset Maugham: A Portrait GalleryAs a novel, however, it was less successful for me. The writing is functional and pared down, with occasional bursts of poetry. These tend to arrive at the end of chapters where the author has the strange habit of pausing scenes to have characters stare impassively at a patch of nature, contemplating eternity. For example: The second point of view is the voice of W Somerset Maugham, the writer who spent most of his life away from Britain writing his own fiction about people he met on his travels.

I’ve wanted to read Tan Twan Eng’s works for years, ever since a few bookish friends of mine read both his previous award-winning novels and kept recommending them to me. While I do have both of those novels on my TBR (as well as physical copies sitting on my shelf), I keep falling into the “too many books, too little time” trap and of course, in the end, I wasn’t able to get to them (someday though, I am determined that I will get to all the books I’ve been meaning to get to!). Anyway, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that when I heard Tan would have a new book out this year, I jumped at the chance to grab a copy, and while I was hoping to have read this one last month before it was actually released, getting to it now is better late than never. One of the standouts is the friendship that grows between Lesley and Willie. Lesley confides about her life in the straits — more than she thought she would tell him. And it was more than Willie expected to hear. Lesley had a personal connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yet Sen. …. The House of Doors is set during Britain’s colonial rule of Malaya, and your other novels have been located in the early or mid-20th century. What is it about that time period that interests you?

This is, indeed, a novel of many doors – perhaps a couple too many. The title refers to the literal kind: the ancient Chinese doors collected by the revolutionary Chinese lover of Lesley Hamlyn, Somerset Maugham’s fictional English host, and stored in the house in downtown Penang in which the couple meet. The novel was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and listed among notable fiction works in 2023 by The Washington Post and The Financial Times.