The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng is not a prolific writer, but his books are worth waiting for. The House of Doors is set mainly in his native Penang, Malaysia, in the 1910s and ´20s. It is based on three real-life events; the writer Somerset Maugham’s visit to Penang in 1921, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen’s visit in 1910, and the trial of Ethel Proudlock, a European wife from Penang accused of murder in 1911 (shifted to 1910 for reasons of dramatic unity).
Each story is interesting in itself, but they never really hang together, linked only by the narrator, Lesley Hamlyn, Maugham’s hostess. The book is structured as a double flashback; Lesley in 1947 remembers Maugham’s visit in 1921 and the stories she told him about the events of 1910. Intriguing but confusing. Also, Lesley speaks in the first person and is paralleled by a narrative from Maugham’s point of view in the third person.
The strength of the book is its evocation of the lives of the small European elite in early 20th-century colonial Asia – a gracious, pampered, narrow, convention-bound lifestyle which flourished even in my parents’ lifetime and has now gone with the wind as utterly as the plantation lifestyle of the antebellum South.
