Tan Twan Eng (2023) The House of Doors.

I wasn’t sure I’d finish this book. I’m snobbish enough to continue reading because the author’s previous novel had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. There’s more than one way to being wrong. At the end of The House of Doors, I felt that flush of acknowledgment of being in such fine company. I’d need to look out for Tan Twan Eng’s other books.

Let me explain my foolishness as the class hatred of the lies and propaganda of Downton Abbey and its ilk. The book has a simple structure. Chapter One, for example, Willie Penang, 1921 begins:

‘Somerset Maugham woke up choking for air. Violent coughing rocked his body until finally, blessedly, it subsided and he could breathe again.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Somerset_Maugham

I’ve read Somerset Maugham’s On Human Bondage. Like most novels I’ve read, I retain  little more than two neurons loosely spliced. I imagined the theme was giving everything up for love, only for the protagonist to find himself failing and falling down the social order. I was surprised to find out Maugham was homosexual, because the protagonist was male and in love with a woman.

Tan Wan Eng quotes Maugham’s The Summing Up: ‘Fact and fiction are intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other’.

Somerset Maugham, Willie to his friend, and former flatmate Robert, has fled England and a disastrous marriage to Sylvie Wellcome to Penang. He has a six-year-old daughter. Four of his plays are running concurrently in London. His ten novels and two sets of short-stories have made him one of the best known and richest writers in the world. He’s achieved respectability and fame. The jumping-off point for a life-changing moment: Willie receives a telegram informing him that £40 000 he invested in a scheme has disappeared. He’s bankrupt. The protection that money gave order to his affairs and hid the shadow side of his life, his homosexuality, is gone. While Maugham can return to England, his secretary, and younger lover, Gerald Haxton cannot.

Robert Hamlyn is a successful barrister in the Straits Settlements of Penang. There’s great social cachet having a successful author staying with them. Wives don’t count for much. Robert married Leslie when he was 42 and she was 22. She tutored music and piano, could talk like a native in their language. She could safely be talked down to by the more important wives before she married Robert. They had two boys. Leslie, his wife, became one of the elite.  

Around 80 000 white Europeans control much of Asia. But it’s dreadfully stifling and full of intrigue as the court of Queen Victoria. Willie needs to write another bestseller to keep his life afloat and his secret life hidden, but he needs material.

Book 2.

Leslie, Penang, 1910.

Leslie offers him her shadow side as a gift. Her ostensible relationship with Dr Sun Yat-Sen. Like Willie he’s a doctor, but his medicine is revolution. He aims to overthrow the corrupt imperial dynasty of China. It’s bad form for Leslie to associate with such a character.

Ethel Proudlock has called Leslie as a character witness in her murder trial. Her alibi is her attacker tried to rape her. In the Kuala Lumpur courts, had it been a native involved, it would not have gone to trial. But the man she shot was English. Sex and scandal that threaten to unravel secrets that were best kept hidden.

Morality has more forms than the Tao. Tan Twan Eng ties his characters together and plucks them apart. Read on.