The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury Publishing)

W. Somerset Maugham was a writer with a talent that verged on the vampiric. Taking advantage of the human “urge to confess,” he kept a travel notebook filled with “anecdotes and character sketches [that can be] smelted and hammered into stories.” In the early part of the 20th century, he journeyed through the Straits Settlements of Malaya and Singapore, having adventures, sucking up stories, and feasting upon secrets. The book that resulted from this journey, The Casuarina Tree, made him a pariah among the British community of the Straits but Maugham was unlikely to care. He was obsessed with keeping his own secret, hiding behind an unhappy marriage to conceal his homosexuality. 

The House of Doors fictionalizes his time on the island of Penang, placing him as a houseguest in the home of a friend from his youth. Cassowary House is named after a casuarina tree in the garden, a corruption of the Malay word, kasuari. The tree, Maugham’s hostess, Lesley,  tells him, is believed to be a “whispering tree” that can tell the future if it’s approached in respectful silence. Maugham can relate to that, although the whispers he yearns to hear are ones that tell stories from the past or, even better, the present..

He’s not the first famous visitor to Penang. Herman Hesse beat him to it by thirteen years and more recently the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, came to garner financial support from the local Hokkein Chinese. Dr. Sun spent a great deal of time at Cassowary House and when Lesley speaks of him, she does with a mixture of reserve and suppressed emotion that intrigues Maugham. Convinced that she betrayed her husband with the charismatic doctor, Maugham divulges a secret of his own and embarks on a series of late night conversations with his hostess, after her husband has gone to bed. What he is told provides a generous portion of his next book, with one startling omission--startling only because he chooses to maintain silence, out of respect for his old friend and the woman with whom he’s developed a deeper friendship.

In The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng matches the master of literary larceny. Within the framework of a doomed clandestine love affair, Eng inserts some of the tales told in The Casuarina Tree into his own novel. Some are fragments of the stories Maugham purloined: the wife who runs away from her wealthy husband without leaving an explanatory note, the uncovered affair that demolishes a marriage, and the tidal bore that sweeps its way up a river and sends the occupants of a boat into deadly water. But the story that carries a substantial part of Eng’s novel is one of Maugham’s most famous, The Letter, that later became a movie of the same name. It recounts the true-life tale of  a notorious Singapore scandal in which an English wife killed a man whom she said had tried to attack her in a nocturnal encounter. She was put on trial, was found guilty., and served time in a Singapore prison.

Eng takes that piece of history and embroiders upon it, turning it into a surprising subplot to the stories Maugham discovers about his hosts in Penang, upon whom Eng has bestowed the first names of the ill-fated husband and wife in The Letter. As Lesley divulges the intricate details of the victimized woman who once was her friend, her own revelations receive a kind of dispensation from a man who finds no shame in his violation of other confidences. 

Although Eng takes Maugham’s stories and folds them into his own, there’s nothing predatory about this hijacking. It’s done with the spirit of homage while Maugham is given a full measure of respect and tenderness, with at least one unforgettable moment of humanity and communion in a sea gleaming with phosphorescence. 

But it’s Lesley who dominates this novel, a woman who has known no other home but the island on which she was born. Through her eyes, we see Penang in its full beauty, its “trees gauzed in mist,” a seaport where “seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts,” where “labrynthine streets sold a bewildering variety of goods”and where at sundown “the world faded to monochrome.” 

As he did in his debut of The Gift of Rain ( reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008), Eng makes Penang and its colorful, tumultuous history irresistible. He overlaps his first novel with this most recent one, with the father of Philip Hutton, the boy whose story is told in the first, making memorable cameo appearances in The House of Doors. Both of these novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize, an honor that Eng would well deserve--and I’m certain that Somerset Maugham would agree with me.~Janet Brown