The House of Doors

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The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. The world is so still, so quiescent, that I wonder if it has stopped turning. But then, high above the land, I see a tremor in the air. A pair of raptors, far from their mountain eyrie. For a minute or two I want to believe they are brahminy kites, but of course they cannot be”. hanging from the ceiling beams were more doors, carefully spaced apart and suspended on wires so thin they seemed to be floating in the air. 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.” Lesley missed her garden — the trees she planted - flowers, shrubs, their high ceilings in Cassowary House, her old busy life of the different committees she was on, but with time, she did adjust realizing she no longer cared about those things. Lesley and Robert’s marriage is a kind of deception too. Behind the facade…are hidden true feelings … as well as adulterous affairs by both.

Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger. I think she’s an underrated writer and should be more widely known. Her shifts of time and viewpoint (the two often happening simultaneously) are seamless and masterful. A person dies in the final scene in Moon Tiger, but Lively doesn’t describe it. All the reader senses is that something has depleted from the room in the nursing home, and that something is… life. And yet… life still goes on.

The doors spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.

When I finished The House of Doors yesterday, I stayed motionless and silent for half an hour, wondering what had just happened. This novel has an old-fashioned charm; it reads as if it were a classic written in the first half of the 20th century. The sense of time and place is evoked in an amazing way, I mean not only the clothes, interiors, furniture, food, nature, landscapes but also the characters' opinions and beliefs. I like the fact that the author led me astray plotwise on several occasions: for example, in the beginning, I thought this was going to be a sort of remake of Out of Africa in a Malayan setting, even the farm in Africa was mentioned, but it all went in a completely, completely different direction.

Maugham is a here a passive character; he is a vessel through which we get to listen to Lesley Hamlyn’s secrets from her past. The writer proves to be an excellent listener, which prompts the disillusioned Lesley to share confidences about events surrounding the visit of the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen to Penang and a famous murder. Both the murder and the visit were real events, although the former took place in 1911. The author puts them together to serve his plotting objectives, to positive results, I think. With a fascinating storyline, ‘The House of Doors’ was also beautifully written, here’s just a small example - “So I remained here, a daub of paint worked by time’s paintbrush into this vast, eternal landscape”. In addition, the author’s descriptions of Penang are stunning, making the landscape almost a character in itself. Highly recommended.

The story starts in 1940s South Africa where Lesley Hamlyn lives on a remote farm. One day she receives a copy of one of Maugham's book which triggers a memory from his visit to her home in Penang decades earlier. This in turn compels Lesley to tell Maugham of events that occurred about a decade prior to his visit, as a story-within-a-story. The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong by W. Somerset Maugham (William Heinemann, 1930)s Penang is where we meet our protagonist Lesley Hamlyn. Her husband Robert is a lawyer, and it’s fair to say that they live a very comfortable life, mixing in the very highest circles. How perfectly this house of doors seemed to reflect the story being told. No direct way through it but one that is navigating step by step. The heart of the story is told by Lesley each evening in retrospect as she tells it to Maugham over their evening drinks alone in the garden. She reveals secrets no one else has ever known and the reader listens along with Maugham to her beautiful but heart-breaking story. The House of Doors is partly a biographical novel, based on a few facts of William Somerset Maughm's life. It depicts the creative process, how literature and reality intersect, and the clash between mundane everyday life and the writer's creativity. An interesting coincidence: I was thinking how Colm Tóibín’s route in his biography of Thomas Mann, The Magician, was different, and in the evening, I read in The Guardian his enthusiastic opinion on this book: The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng is fascinating, engrossing and has given me infinite pleasure. I couldn't agree more. 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.