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Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors, Canongate, 2023. 320 pgs.
Third novels can be tricky. The second has to prove the first was not a fluke. Something more is expected of the third.
Tan Twan Engβs third novel is his best so far. This one is something new, though it bears many of his familiar features: the setting in colonial Malaya; the complicated time scheme; the often-lyrical prose cool despite the equatorial settings and sometimes-lurid subject matter, in this case adultery and murder; the obsession with secrets and storytelling. All novels withhold and disclose information, and in this sense, every novel is about secrets. But The House of Doors is especially fascinated with secrets and those who keep or share themβlawyers, journalists, gossips, servants, conspirators, lovers, criminals. The novel also explores the economics of secrets. βIf you want someone to confide in you,β says one character, βyou must first offer him some private morsel of your own.β
These words are ascribed to the novelist William Somerset Maugham, whom we see arriving in Penang in 1921, accompanied by his raffish secretary and lover Gerald Haxton. Maugham at this time was one of the most successful writers in the world, and an inveterate globetrotter who was travelling the East in search of copy for his fiction. Some of the gossip he picked up locally made its way into his story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926), much to the consternation of expatriate society in the Federation of Malay States. Despite his celebrity, however, Maugham had secrets of his own, betrayed, perhaps, by a lifelong stammer: he had had a troubled and lonely childhood, his marriage was a disaster, his fortune was imperilled by imprudent investments, and his homosexuality was a crime in England throughout his long life (he died in 1965 at the age of 91).
Another celebrated visitor to Penang was the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, who came to the city from Singapore, trying to raise support and funds from the Nanyang Chinese for yet another attempt to liberate his homeland and create a Chinese republic. Sun and his associates, and their dealings with the residents of Penang, provide the political theme of the novel. A third strand of actuality centres on a notorious murder trial, in which an English woman, Ethel Proudlock, stood accused of shooting dead her lover on the veranda of her villa one steamy evening. The case became the basis for one of Maughamβs best short stories, βThe Letterβ.
Gossip, mystery, and scandal adhere to all threeβMaugham, Sun, and Ethel. The linking figure is a fictional character, Lesley Hamlyn, a married Englishwoman who has lived all her life in Penang, and who is Maughamβs host, a supporter of Sun, and friend of the accused Ethel. Lesley, a first-person narrator, shares the burden of telling the story with Maugham, who is the focus of alternating chapters. The chapters themselves move back and forth between 1910 and 1911, the year of the murder, and 1921, the year of Maughamβs visit, and they are framed by the older Lesleyβs retrospective in 1947, after she has moved to South Africa, to a farm on the edge of the Great Karoo Desert. (Lesley gravitates to liminal spaces; when troubled, she tends to wander off to the seashore; along with its fondness for dusk, this may be a symptom of the novelβs colonial belatedness.)
βPenang is a kampong,β Lesleyβs mother used to say, βand everybody knows everybodyβs secrets.β But this is not quite true. Maugham manages to keep most of his secrets, and does not put Lesleyβs secret love affair into his stories, rather to her surprise. Lesley doesnβt learn of Ethel Proudlockβs secret until decades later. Most of Sunβs Chinese political donors keep their anonymity, and though he is eventually expelled from Penang for publishing an anti-British newspaper article, his revolutionary plans are not betrayed. Still, all through the novel there is a constant quiet churn of conversational investigation, misdirection, speculation and disclosure, which provides the texture of the story. It is the thoughtful, melancholic, worldly presence of Maugham that gives this book a dimension that was missing from the two earlier novels.
He emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic character. Though Maughamβs reputation was for beady-eyed dispassionate observation, Lesley, reading the sketches in On a Chinese Screen, finds no cruelty in the way he treats his characters (Iβm not sure she is right about this). Something we might call empathy allows his imagination to be shared with his readers. βHe had recorded their quirks and weaknesses with an unsparing eye, but he did so without any sneer of superiority. In fact, he seemed to give the impression that he saw himself in some of those people. Reading those stories, I imagined myself in the towns and villages he had written about, all those places in that country that I knew I would never be able to visit.β
In sharing this estimation of Maugham the writer, Tan Twan Eng may be disclosing a secret about himself as a writer. There is in this book and in Tanβs other novels a coolness of observation, a quietness and a kind of propriety of style that might have been found in Maughamβs own fictions of colonial life. In some ways, Tanβs scope is wider, to be sure. Maugham travelled quite adventurously, in China and South-East Asia and the Pacific, but wherever he was, he wrote from a vantage of colonial privilege, with its attendant blind spots. He had no choice. Even Lesley Hamlyn, a native of Penang who can converse in Hokkien and Malay and occasionally dresses in the full panoply of a Nonya lady, is someone who is treated everywhere with deference and always gets a seat in the front row. When her husbandβs health requires a change, they relocate comfortably to another part of the British Empire on another continent.
Tan Twan Engβs belonging to Malaysia, and especially to Penang, is necessarily of a different kind. As in The Gift of Rain (whose Hutton family can be glimpsed occasionally in the background of this new novel), the brilliant island city is fully present here, a character in its own right, with its sights and smells, its weather and its streets, its busy jumble of different peoples. In the end, the principal characters, Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Sun Yat-sen and his followers, Maugham and the deplorable Haxton, and poor Ethel Proudlock, all leave the city. Penang remains. After the stories, the memory, like this one of Lesleyβs: βAt the end of the bay I crossed the cool ankle-deep stream and climbed to the top of the highest boulder. I sat there, staring out to sea. The water was clear, the shoals of rocks on the seabed stark as bruises on skin.β
How to cite:Β Kerr, Douglas. βSome Private Morsel of Your Own: Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors.”Β Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Jun. 2023,Β chajournal.blog/2023/06/27/house-of-doors.
Douglas Kerr is a former Professor of English and Dean of Arts at Hong Kong University, and a Cha contributor. He lived in Hong Kong for some thirty-seven years, half of them in the colony and half in the Special Administrative Region. His most recent book is Orwell and Empire (OUP, 2022). He now lives in London. [All contributions by Douglas Kerr.]
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