Tan Twan Eng
Canongate
Otago Daily Times, 2023
Two-time Booker nominee Tan Twang Eng’s third novel has just made this year’s long list: an impressive achievement in anybody’s estimation.
On March 1st 1921, William – Willie – Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald arrive at Cassowary House, the Penang home of his friend, Robert Hamlyn and wife Lesley. In fragile health and hoping for a few weeks’ respite, he is greeted by the news that the brokerage handling his finances has collapsed, leaving him penurious and his relationship with Gerald (for whom the arrangement is more fiscal than romantic) in jeopardy. Forced back to his writing desk, Maugham combs his journals for story seeds only to find the urge to write, which has sustained him for so long, has deserted him.
Lesley, meanwhile, is facing a crisis of her own. Robert has announced his intention to sell Cassowary House and move to South Africa for the sake of his health and, loth to leave her childhood home, she is contemplating leaving a marriage that is as much a sham as Willie’s. Her initial response to her guests is hostile, but reading On a Chinese Screen awakens memories of her time working with Chinese philosopher-rebel Sun Yat-Sen and the Tong Meng Hui in the lead-up to the Xinhai Revolution. Recognising in Maugham a means of memorialising love that can never be spoken of, she shares with him both her story and that of her friend Ethel Proudfoot, a British woman sentenced to death for killing an ex-lover who tried to rape her. Fragments of these late-night revelations will eventually be incorporated into “The Letter”, traces of forbidden history that last long after all are gone, “like a bird of the mountain, [carrying] a name beyond the cloud, beyond even time itself.”
Eng draws on historical records and Maugham’s own writing to create a rich and textured exploration of the complex relationship between fact and fiction, public morality and private truth, and the contradictions and assumptions of 20th-century colonialism. Willie and Robert hide their identities behind the institution of marriage, safety that comes at the cost of their unwitting spouses, who are left believing themselves neither desirable nor desired (as Lesley angrily puts it, “We are wives, not martyrs.”) The British occupy Malaysia with causal superiority, yet Lesley sees no irony encouraging Malay Chinese to fight for democracy in China.
The House of Doors has its flaws – there were times in which I felt my attention drifting, my sympathy sliding away from Lesley’s reserve or Willie’s angst – but it deserves its place on the Booker longlist for its moment of unexpected beauty. Going back through the book for this review I rediscovered many such instances, most gloriously the image from which the novel draws its name: Within the house where Lesley and her lover meet is a room in which a forest of painted doors hang suspended, “[spinning] slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.”
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