The House of Doors - Tan Twan Eng (and a 2023 Booker Prize Challenge Update)

 

 Tan Twan Eng is on a roll. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was longlisted for what was then called the Man Booker Prize; his second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was shortlisted for the Man Booker; and in 2023 The House of Doors, the author's third novel, was longlisted for the Booker. 

Robert and Lesley Hamlyn are visited in 1921 at their home on the Straits Settlement of Penang by Robert's old friend "Willie" Somerset Maugham. Maugham, a traveler by nature, is there to rest up a little while he hopes to gather material for stories that will bring him a much needed cash infusion when they are published. Accompanying Maugham is Gerald, whom Maugham calls his secretary but is actually the author's thinly disguised lover. Lesley, though initially less than thrilled to have Maugham stay in her home, eventually grows close enough to the man to confide in him secrets about what life in Penang is really like for her and her friends. Maugham, always on the lookout for stories set in exotic locations, is of course all ears. 

In just a few days, Maugham hears accounts of husbands who cheat on their wives and wives who cheat on their husbands in retaliation, and he listens to Lesley recount her friendship with Dr. Sun Yat Sen from when the Chinese revolutionary came to Penang ten years earlier to raise badly needed money to support his efforts to overthrow China's Manchu dynasty. But perhaps most intriguing of all to Maugham, he hears for the first time of Ethel Proudlock, the Englishwoman who ten years earlier became the first European woman to be put on trial in Malaya for murder. Ethel, accused of murdering a man she says attempted to rape her - one William Steward - faced death by hanging if convicted of the crime. Locals, having been told by the European colonizers over and over again that "everyone is equal before the law, white or brown, black or yellow," watched closely to see what would happen now that "one of their own" was on trial for her life.

The House of Doors is beautifully written, with Twan alluding to the below-the-surface complexity of life for Europeans living in Penang during the period by describing the actual "house of doors" from which the novel's title is taken:

"We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge." (Page 178)

The House of Doors is historical fiction at its finest.

Tan Twan Eng jacket photo

 

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2023 Booker Prize - Challenge Update:

I have now read seven of the thirteen Booker Prize nominees and decided not to finish two others. I have another one on hand, and the remaining three are on hold at the library. I personally rank the nine books I've spent time with so far this way:

1. The House of Doors
2. The Bee Sting
3. If I Survive You
4. Western Lane
5. Pearl
6. Old God's Time
7. This Other Eden
8. A Spell of Good Things
9. In Ascension

Still to go:

• All the Little Bird-Hearts
• Prophet Song
• Study for Obedience
• How to Build a Boat