Published just this year (it's rare I read anything so new), this is by Tan Twan Eng, a Malaysian author whose work I greatly admire.

I really loved The Gift of Rain, set in Penang (it was published in 2007, and I read it in Malaysia in 2010, just as we were leaving our Singapore base to go back to Australia). The Garden of Evening Mists, set in the Cameron Highlands, came out in 2012, and I read it in 2015, again in Malaysia, fitting it in round an insanely busy job. I liked it somewhat less than the first, but would still highly recommend it (and it won the 2012 Man Asian Literature Prize, making Tan the first Malaysian author to receive this accolade).

I mention these details, because WHERE you read and WHEN you read matter with any book, but particularly, I think, with Tan's. He somehow melds a very specific sense of place (Malaysia) with a strong current of cosmopolitanism (he wrote Rain while living in Cape Town, and missing Malaysia; and while he was writing Evening Mists, he was frequently travelling). Tan's stories also always work across time-periods, with the past shaping the present, and the present struggling to interpret and digest the past.

So, eight years have gone by since I last experienced the nostalgic, regretful, interconnected kind of world Tan creates; I've lost a lot of things in that period; I live in a completely different part of Malaysia now; and I listened this time, as opposed to reading (my version was expertly co-narrated by David Oakes and Louise-Mai Newberry).

But the magic still works. I think this book is his best so far.



We move between three time periods. The opening and closing sections are set in Doornfontein, South Africa, 1947. Penang-born Briton Lesley Hamlyn has been there for 25 years, ever since she and Robert, her 18-years-older husband, left Penang because his health required a drier climate. It's now a while since Robert died, but Lesley has never been tempted to go back to her birthplace, even though she actually never really wanted to leave. There's been the war, of course, but you also start to feel that though she misses Malaysia, there is now a void in the place she was once so fond of. Then a book arrives, mailed in September 1946 from Penang. It's The Casuarina Tree by W. Somerset Maugham. It's certainly not the first time she has seen this collection of stories, but this copy holds a particular significance. The book ends with Lesley preparing to head back. The nothing she feared going back to has obviously become a something that has galvanized her.

Between these two 1947 bookends, we fill in the story of Lesley's life, alternating -- because, as she says, stories, like waves on the sea, never let you identify their precise starting point -- between 1921, when W. Somerset Maugham (known to friends such as Robert as Willie) first stays with the Hamlyns in Penang, and 1910/1911, when colonial society is convulsed not only by the continued activities of Sun Yat Sen, who is fund-raising and proselytizing for the longed-for Chinese revolution from his base on the island, but also by the trial of Ethel Proudlock, a British woman accused of shooting dead the male compatriot who, she said, had attacked her in her home in Kuala Lumpur.

We also alternate between two points of view. Lesley's is a first-person narrative, while Maugham's story-seeking progress is tracked by a third-person account.


Robert takes Maugham to visit the Protestant Cemetery in George Town

There's a lot going on, then. But it holds together very coherently. Over the course of the novel, we learn a fair amount about the three "real" protagonists, linked as they are by the fictional Lesley (whose British education, command of Malay and Hokkien, and evident delight in the culture and ambiance of Penang, make her an ideal go-between).

Maugham, though a highly successful author at that point, is a troubled man. Accompanied on his travels, as always, by Gerald, his much younger secretary/lover, he learns while staying with the Hamlyns that he has lost all his money on a dodgy bit of investment. What Maugham fears as a result is not only poverty, and the continuing necessity to keep on writing for money, even when stories do not always seem to flow freely, but also -- perhaps mostly -- abandonment by Gerald, who comes across as something of a gold-digger. Back in England there's a wife Maugham does not love, and he and his coterie are still "reeling from the death knell rung across England by poor Oscar Wilde’s fate" (homosexuality was illegal in England throughout the whole of Maugham's long life). Plus, he is still haunted by a narrow escape from death in Borneo (he and Gerald were caught by the benak in Sri Aman).

The portrait of Maugham is warts-and-all, but sympathetic, I felt. He's preternaturally curious and observant, and indiscreet in what he publishes, but he does not come across (in this version at least) as cruel. Lesley eventually confides in him about the traumas of the previous decade. She not only tells him what she knows of the Proudlock case, but also describes the stormy seas her marriage sailed into at that point (she finds out that Robert has a male Chinese lover, and she begins an extramarital relationship with Arthur, a Straits Chinese lawyer and Sun Yat Sen supporter). Maugham is loyal enough, however, not to incriminate her or Robert in the story he eventually publishes.


Maugham stayed at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (as did we -- briefly but wonderfully -- in 2018)

Sun Yat Sen, meanwhile, is struggling to gain support from the Straits Chinese in Penang, whose loyalties, he is told, lie with Great Britain rather than China. But he is the archetypal, won't-give-up revolutionary, who campaigns relentlessly until a spark in China gives him the toehold he needs. Lesley struggles to reconcile Sun's theoretical support for women's rights with his somewhat chaotic personal life, but she respects him enough to want to work for his cause.


The Sun Yat Sen Museum in Penang


The Original Penang Philomatic Society location

Roughly contemporaneous with Sun's activities, we have the story of Ethel Proudlock, whose case falls foul of the racism and sexism of the day. All the men we encounter sympathize in knee-jerk fashion with William Steward, and none seeks to question his potential responsibility in the whole business. And the double standards of the day mean that Ethel is willing to hang rather than admit she once had an affair with him (men, meanwhile, can take extra partners with impunity, as we see with Willie, Sun Yat Sen, and Robert...) Ethel's husband and father who -- it is rumoured -- also bear some of the responsibility in the shooting scenario, get off scot free, while Ethel's mixed-race background makes her something of a pariah before she even starts.



But the complexity of The House of Doors doesn't stop with its characters. It also has many textual layers.

It's a story, firstly, about stories -- about who gets to tell them, and with what effect, and who gets to decide when they begin and end. And the threads of this particular narration are there for all to see. As Douglas Kerr points out, "All through the novel there is a constant quiet churn of conversational investigation, misdirection, speculation and disclosure, which provides the texture of the story."

Secondly, it's a story about relationships. There's much that's tragic here, partly because society exercises way too much control over the question of which relationships are sanctioned, and which aren't. But the story also exudes a little hope in this area. At the beginning, you feel Lesley and Robert have a sad and empty marriage; each is locked in his/her own little world, and has little to say to the other. By the end, though, having understood what storms they've been through, you realize that there are much worse things than amicable silence, and the quiet companionable resignation of letting-bygones-be-bygones. And sometimes, Tan tells us, we get a lucky break. After all these years, there's now something -- someone -- waiting for Lesley in Penang again.



The title refers to Lesley's lover's collection of old Chinese doors, which he keeps in a plain-looking house. The many metaphors it comprises underline some of these relationship themes: Doors that do not actually lead anywhere; beautiful things that remain hidden, and bely the plain exterior that encloses them; ancient things that are preserved by a passionate collector but have lost their original context...

Thirdly, this is a story about Penang, by someone who knows it intimately. Tan is a master of evocative description. You just have to listen, and it's there in front of your eyes, engaging all the senses.



No book is flawless. At times, because Doors has a lot of history to communicate, it feels a tiny bit didactic. It's hard to avoid this, probably, especially when publishers always want readers to be spoon-fed, and there's constant pressure to "explain" everything. Just occasionally, too, the lyrical prose ever so slightly overreaches itself.

But these are minor issues. The bottom line is that this is a rich and rewarding book, beautifully executed by a very talented author.

Like all good novels, too, it points you onwards to more.

First on the list: Revisit Maugham. As a younger person, I liked his work, and then kind of went off it. It would be interesting to take another look.



Second, investigate Paul Verlaine... Quoted in the text of The House of Doors is one of his poems, absolutely beautiful, called L'heure exquise. (Here is Philippe Jaroussky's hauntingly lovely rendering of the setting by Reynaldo Hahn -- if that doesn't give you goose-bumps, you're a lost cause.) This poem was part of a collection called La Bonne Chanson, which Verlaine wrote to Mathilde Maure, his intended. Marriage to Mathilde, he hoped, would take him away from the somewhat wild lifestyle he had led to date, and set him off on a new, stable, morally responsible path... Yeah, well, we all know how well resolutions like that tend to work. Less than two years after his wedding, Verlaine took off with aspiring poet Arthur Rimbaud, just 16 years old at the time, and the two "vagabonded around France, Belgium and England" for a while. The liaison produced Verlaine's Romances sans paroles, widely considered to be his best work. But it culminated in an incident where Verlaine, learning that Rimbaud was about to leave him, shot him, wounded him in the hand, and ended up in prison... It's a sad story -- and a crazy-paving reflection of some of the themes in The House of Doors.

Third, read more about Sun Yat Sen, whose fortunes we have followed over the years in Singapore, Taipei, Chongqing, George Town, and Taiping.

I always love a book that comes with a reading list, even if implicit...