The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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They currently have none other than famous novelist and old friend of Robert’s, W. Somerset Maugham (whom they affectionately call Willie) staying with them. 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.

Tan studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur's leading law firms before becoming a full-time writer. [2]This is a fascinatingly layered novel, drawing upon a range of different modes and themes – patriarchy, political turmoil, illicit love affairs and concealed sexuality – with a courtroom drama (based upon real events, which also inspired Maugham’s story ‘The Letter’) at the heart of it. The book is Tan’s first since the publication of the Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists in 2012, and like its predecessor it moves between different time periods while immersing us in the history of 20th-century British Malaya. A particularly compelling strand of the story involves the arrival of the Chinese political thinker (and future leader) Sun Yat Sen, who plans his revolution from Penang. The scenes centred on his underground political party, the Tong Meng Hui, present an invigorating contrast to those featuring high-society parties. Lesley is fascinated by Sun’s blistering speech-making: ‘I felt that he was binding all of us to a covenant, a covenant for a future he would sacrifice everything for, even his life, to bring into existence.’ 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 book does fulfill one of my desires of historical fiction, which is to teach me something I didn’t know. In this case, it’s Sun Yat-sen’s rebellion against the Qing dynasty. What is most wonderful about this book is the lush, luxuriant descriptions of Penang, a land of ‘cloying humidity’. The sea is ‘emerald and turquoise, chipped with a million white scratches’, while on Penang Hill, ‘dragonflies with stained-glass wings stitched invisible threads in the air’. Through this deceptively lulling atmosphere, Tan has woven a superb, quietly complex tale of love, duty and betrayal. For People Who Devour Books TAN: Well, you know, in a way, I don't want to make people unhappy or create a lot of misunderstandings. I want to present the character as authentic and accurate. So I don't go out of the way to just highlight the negative parts. But I also try to create a fair representation of the character.

The House of Doors is Tan’s first novel since 2012’s Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists and shares many of its themes. It’s a book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy that sideslips through the decades and passes the narrative baton between Lesley and Maugham. While Tan – born in Penang of Straits Chinese descent – is deliberately writing in the voice of the oppressor, he generally does so with care, conscious of the limits of his characters’ language and worldview. If colonial Malaysia is a pastiche of middle-class England, his drama is its costumed morality play. The visit, intended as an opportunity for the famous author to rest after physically taxing travels around Asia — and to further avoid his wife in London, whom he never should have married — turns out to be less relaxing than he'd hoped. It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.There's much to be said about Eng's ability to craft a scene, especially the vivid settings and descriptions of nature. Though the novel as a whole seems to fall into many of the tropes of historical fiction, he does excel in rendering a location or crafting a rich environment within which his characters reside.