Book review: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Tan Tan Eng writes about the writer William Somerset Maugham in Penang ... it's fabulous, scandalous, and dangerous ...
Born in the British Embassy in Paris, Somerset Maugham lived in the city for the first ten years of his life before his family moved back to England. He returned to France for his last years, dying in Nice at the age of 91.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was regarded as one of the greatest British writers of the 20th century. English writer Evelyn Waugh said Maugham’s disciplined writing was never boring nor clumsy. American playwright Lee Wilson Dodd said, “Mr. Maugham knows how to plan a story and carry it through. Competence is the word,” but he added that his style is “without a trace of imaginative beauty.” Nevertheless, it was his short stories that garnered the most praise with writers acknowledging that some would surely become immortal.
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (2023) opens in South Africa in 1947 as the painter Lesley C Hamlyn recalls the year 1921 in Penang, Malaya, when she met Somerset Maugham and commenced a romantic-literary relationship with him.
This book is neither about Maugham’s early years, nor his long life and legacy. Lesley C Hamlyn begins in 1921 in Penang when Maugham is 47 during his mid-life crisis. Willie Somerset Maugham is in ill health, his income is decreasing, his marriage to Syrie is struggling, and his writing is suffering. He visits Penang to see his lawyer friend Robert Hamlyn and his wife Lesley who live there. Robert is ill too, with a lung ailment, and wants to move to the dry climate of South Africa.
The title of the book The House of Doors comes from the chapter when Lesley visits an art collector friend who has suspended ornamental doors on thin wires, lifting them off the ground as if they are floating in air. The doors open into passageways going nowhere or somewhere into the unknown. The entire dizzying scene merges reality with illusion, friend with enemy, truth with lies, egos with alter ego, and fact with fiction, mirroring life in Penang after World War II.
Willie is looking to revive his writing career and is seeking a plot with impact. Sharing his thoughts with Lesley, she has a vivid imagination, a host of true scandalous story ideas, and a penchant for the writer as their relationship burgeons.
Lesley reveals Maugham’s writing habits and routines, from his inspirational morning walks before breakfast to writing solidly for four hours. They talk about his novels and his short stories, especially the controversial “Rain” story. She tells him about scandalous legal cases – excellent material for his story “The Letter” and the 1940 Bette Davis film of the same name. She tells him her secrets, knowing well that they could be used in his next stories. She is his love interest. He says a love interest is essential in a story – “And a story without love … well it just wouldn’t work.”
This immersive story is well structured and superbly written, of fiction and historical fact, with characters that beleague and intrigue.
