TAN TWAN ENG The House of Doors. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, Tan Twan Eng’s novel reimagines the events in Penang that inspired a famous Somerset Maugham story.

Those familiar with Tan Twan Eng’s writing, and that of Somerset Maugham, will know they are in for pleasant reading when in Chapter One they discover Willie Somerset Maugham is to be one of the two protagonists in Tan’s latest novel, The House of Doors. Like Maugham, Tan works hard at his stories and his narratives are rewardingly complex, no more so in than in The House of Doors. As in his earlier novel, The Garden of Evening Mist, he plays skilfully with time, and here he cleverly creates two narratives, both set in Penang. The first takes place in 1911 and the second in 1921, the year ‘Willie’ Somerset Maugham comes to visit. 

As William Boyd writes in his review of Selina Hasting’s biography of Maugham, The Secret Life of Somerset Maugham, Maugham was always aware of the limits of his imagination. He relied on the stories he heard and the people he met on his travels as material for his impressive number of short stories, plays and novels. In The House of Doors, Maugham’s ears prick up when he senses not one but two stories while staying with friends, fictional characters Robert and Lesley Hamlyn, in Penang in 1921. 

Maugham is certain from the manner in which Lesley Hamlyn talks about the Chinese revolutionary Dr Sun Yat Sen that she had an affair with him when Sun was in Penang ten years earlier. 

Now and again he stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye. Just another unhappily married woman in the tropics. His instincts told him she had had an affair with the Chinaman revolutionary …

Dr Sun Yat Sen, who doesn’t often crop up as a romantic hero in novels, was indeed a charismatic man who travelled the world extensively; that he might have had an affair with a western woman is for the most part plausible. The second story, more Maugham’s territory than the first, relates to what Maugham hears about Ethel Proudlock, who was put on trial in 1911 for shooting and killing a man who threatened to rape her. Tan adroitly uses what Maugham discovers about Lesley Hamlyn to effectively explain the testimony Lesley is forced to give in the trial of her friend Ethel Proudlock. In the courtroom scenes Tan creates real tension and they are some of the best sections of the book.

In both stories Tan successfully recreates the claustrophobic and gossip-filled atmosphere we’ve come to expect in expatriate societies in Southeast Asia, India or Africa. Ironically it is perhaps courtesy of writers like Maugham, and particularly James Fox in his very successful White Mischief, a non-fiction account of the murder of the 22nd Earl of Erroll in Kenya, that we do see expatriate societies in this way. These communities are made up of white people who have next to no interest in the people and the culture of the country they are living in. They seem to spend much of their time romanticising ‘home’ – i.e. Britain – and having affairs. It goes without saying all of them are dangerously, sometimes vindictively, caught up in the business of others. In particular it’s the women, who had little to do in these foreign environments, who are apportioned much of the blame. Robert Hamlyn sums them up when Lesley accuses him of having an affair:

‘Is this why you’ve been acting oddly – because you think I’m having an affair – with another woman? Where the hell did you get this, this lunatic idea from? Those dried-up hags from the club? Pykett’s barren wife and her mahjong coven? Or Mrs Biggs? That bloody woman’s mouth is as big as her arse.’

The House of Doors is a complex story, in effect two stories in one, each paralleling the themes of the other. If this was not enough, Tan also writes about such diverse subjects as the history of China leading up to the 1911 Revolution, as well as the difficulties faced by creative writers. In the scene depicting the beginning of the friendship between Lesley Hamlyn and Maugham, they are talking about sunsets and Maugham tells Lesley a story.

‘I had just lunched with my agent at the Garrick, a very long and boozy lunch during which he informed me that my first three plays had been so successful that I didn’t have to worry about money ever again … And all I could think of at that moment –’ 

‘For God’s sake, Willie, don’t be such a tease.’

‘I thought,’ he said, laying out each word carefully in a clear, precise line, ‘Thank God I don’t have to describe another pretty sunset ever again.’

Tan takes on a lot in The House of Doors, but in a novel replete with history, romance, wonderful descriptions of Penang and not one good narrative but two, he manifests skill enough to pull it all off. That Maugham used one of the stories first in his famous short story ‘The Letter’ tells you just how good it could be.

Tan Twan Eng The House of Doors Canongate 2024 edition PB 320pp $24.99

Catherine Pardey has reviewed for Rochford Street Review and The Beast.

You can buy The House of Doors from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Chinese revolution of 1911, historical fiction, Malaysian novelists, Penang, Somerset | Maugham, Sun Yat Sen, Tan Twan | Eng, The Letter, writers lives