The House of Doors

"Tan Twan Eng’s captivating, lushly atmospheric novel, set largely in 1921 Penang, imagines a two-week stay by the writer William Somerset Maugham at the home of an old friend. “Willie,” ever on the prowl for new material, finds plenty to spark his interest in his host’s apparently lovelorn wife, Lesley Hamlyn. The House of Doors encompasses at-the-time risky interracial and same-sex love stories, a scandalous (actual) murder trial and – through the discrepancies between what Lesley confides in Willie and the stories she later reads in Maugham’s 1926 collection, The Casuarina Tree – a clever exploration of the art of transforming life experiences into literature."

"There are a lot of different strands to this novel, one of which is secrets. But it’s also about memory and loss, and the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. Set in 1921 in the Straits Settlements of Penang, we have Somerset Maugham and his lover coming to stay with the Hamlyns: Robert Hamlyn, a lawyer, and his wife Lesley a society hostess. The visit is uneasy. Everybody has secrets, and Somerset Maugham was notoriously good at persuading people to share them, and then, barely disguising the characters, using the stories to his own authorial advantage. With great artistry, Tan Twan Eng shows us how the unravelling of secrets leads to other stories—and so, in The House of Doors , we have, through Lesley Hamlyn’s eyes, the story of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the revolutionary, the story of Ethel Proudlock, who shot a man and was charged with murder, and the secrets of Lesley herself. Stories within stories, and all told with what has been called the ‘reverse colonial gaze’. Yes, it’s a different angle. Brave! And Tan Twan Eng has a wonderful style, sharp and clear. Those painted doors! ‘They spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.” It has. Given the apparent strictures on novelists, whether real or imagined – accusations of cultural appropriation, for example –there’s always the worry that writers might avoid writing about anything beyond themselves. Of course, we’ll never know how many historical novels will not be written because in the climate of culture wars people are nervous, but among the novels that have arrived I think there is a brightness, yes, a kind of optimism, and a determination to write about things in which the writer is interested, and in which writers feel readers will be interested. So that’s heartening, and I’m sure I can speak for my fellow Walter Scott Prize judges when I say that we’re already looking forward to next year."