Tan Twan Eng
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng opens in 1947 in Doornfontein, South Africa. Lesley Hamlyn has just received Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories in The Casuarina Tree. Cradling the book in her hands, she is transported back to the time she and her husband lived in Penang, Malaya, in the 1920s. She recalls the year 1921 when Somerset Maugham, her husband’s close friend, spent two weeks with them in Malaya. Maugham was accompanied by his secretary/lover, Gerald Haxton. As she reads his stories, Lesley marvels at how Maugham wove facts with fiction in crafting his stories.
Having set the background, Tan Twan Eng unfolds the novel in two threads. The first thread takes place in 1921 and consists of Lesley’s meeting with Maugham and subsequent conversations with him. The second thread consists of Lesley revealing to Maugham the events that occurred in 1910, eleven years before she met him. Included in these events is the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, her own affair, her political activism with Sun Yat-Sen’s movement to overthrow the government in China, and the trial of Ethel Proudlock for murder.
In essence, The House of Doors is about how real events and experiences are manipulated into material for fiction. Somerset Maugham does this when he crafts Lesley’s revelations into material for his short stories; and Tan Twan Eng does it by weaving into his novel Somerset Maugham’s actual Penang visit and referencing the short stories which emerged from the visit. The result is a book about memory, about the hunger to tell our stories and be heard, about the building blocks that form the foundations for story-telling, and about love and forgiveness.
Tan’s style is elegant and restrained; his prose, descriptive; his verbs, active; his recreation of the sights and sounds of plush, exotic landscapes, immersive; his characters, authentic; and his ability to weave an engaging story, masterful.
Highly recommended.