Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng has earned worldwide acclaim for emotionally astute fiction and elegant prose that illuminate historical dramas little known to many American readers. Each of his three novels, including his new "The House of Doors," has earned a spot on the Booker Prize longlist.
True events inspired Eng's latest: In the 1920s, novelist William Somerset Maugham was at the height of his success. Rather than settling anywhere for long, he preferred traveling the world to seek ideas, avoid persecution over his relationship with secretary and companion Gerald Haxton and flee his unhappy marriage to his London-based wife. Maugham was a popular guest in what was then known as the Federated Malay States, until he ruffled society feathers by using the gossip of the upper-class British he encountered as the basis for his 1926 story collection "The Casuarina Tree."
In "The House of Doors," Eng imagines that Maugham meets a woman who shares secrets freely, knowing what he will do with them — as an act of liberation from her stifled life. The novel contains scandals of many flavors: the murder of a jilted lover and the sensational trial that followed it, a husband's concealed homosexuality and an interracial infidelity.
As the novel opens, "Willie" Maugham arrives in Penang to visit old friend Robert Hamlyn and his wife, Lesley. Maugham is famous and in-demand as a dinner guest but privately suffering, having learned he's lost his fortune and can't afford to travel with Gerald any longer. He's in desperate need of ideas for a new book so he can earn back some of what he lost.
Lesley is also at a crossroads. After growing up in Penang, a city she loves, and raising her sons there, Robert's doctor insists they move to South Africa's dry climate to improve Robert's health. "There's something about her," Willie observes of Lesley to Gerald, "something clenched up." Gerald replies, "Just another woman in the colonies stuck in an unhappy marriage." But as Willie befriends Lesley, he learns there's much more to her than that, including her involvement in China's 1911 revolution.
"The House of Doors" is propelled by fascinating characters, the tension over their gradual revelations and Eng's exquisite writing, with transporting descriptions of "coconut fronds casting fish-skeleton shadows on the soft, fine sand" and "smoke unthread[ing] from the joss sticks, plaiting and dividing as it climbed into the bright sunlight."
At this novel's heart are questions of to whom stories belong, whether it's morally justifiable to hamper someone else's private life in an effort to avoid public persecution and the sundry costs of love.
Willie asks Lesley, "Think of the books you remember … aren't they all, ultimately, about love?" Eng has taken Maugham's advice and crafted an arresting, melancholy story about romantic complications, in a time and place when customs and law placed strict limits on whom one could love.
Jenny Shank, author of "Mixed Company" and "The Ringer," is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is on the faculty of the Mile High MFA at Regis University in Denver.
The House of Doors
By: Tan Twan Eng.
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 320 pages, $28.99.
