Book Review: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

I’d heard good things about The House of Doors and being a fan of historical fiction have had it on my to-read list since it came out last year. The story is set for the most part in Penang, Malaysia, across a couple of time periods. We’re in 1921 when the author Somerset Maugham visits his old friend Robert Hamlyn for an extended stay accompanied by his secretary/lover Gerald. Maugham is in a bad way financially and is desperate to find stories to write about, tapping into his travels and the people he meets.

The narrative is from the point of view of both Maugham and Lesley Hamlyn, Robert’s wife, and as the days pass, she tells her own story from a decade before. This includes her meetings with Sun Yat-Sen, the revolutionary leader working to overthrow a despotic Chinese government. He has visited Penang to raise funds for the cause. We also learn of a court case where Lesley’s best friend has been accused of murdering an expat engineer. And then there’s Lesley’s secret affair.

This is such a rich novel, not only for its interesting period, of Chinese history, and the Penang setting but because of the beautiful writing. You get a vivid sense of the place, the lush tropical vegetation, the beach and the narrow streets of the town, the food and the smells. You can see why the book was longlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Walter Scott Prize.

But I was also drawn into the story of Somerset Maugham and how he found inspiration for his hugely popular books. As well as reading him many years ago, I remember seeing one or two the books made into films, and there was a similar atmosphere of lives caught up in unhappy marriages, of expats living aimlessly in a crumbling empire. Tan Twan Eng also captures this mood, but also develops themes about the complexity of relationships between men and women, between races, as well as the pull of convention.

The House of Doors isn’t a long book, just scraping in at 300 pages, but it packs a lot in like a small but delicious cake with subtle, nuanced flavours. Definitely a five-star read, and I’ll be reading everything by this author from now on. So far, he’s written only three books, with a big gap between each, but it will still be worth the wait.

Posted by JAM

4 March 2024

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