The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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Life here for us was not much different from our old one in Penang. Robert and I had our own bedrooms, and every morning we would meet for breakfast on the verandah. Afterwards he would adjourn to his study to work on his memoirs – he had begun writing them shortly after we moved here. There was not much to keep me busy around the house. Liesbet, the wife of one of the Coloured farm workers, cooked and cleaned for us. She was a few years older than me, a fat woman with broad flanks and a round smiling face which reminded me of the Malays in Penang. To fill my days I decided to create a garden in front of the house. The soil was as dry as the powder in my compact, but with the help of Liesbet’s son Pietman, I persevered with it. As Willie prepares to leave and face his demons, Lesley throws caution to the wind, and confides how she came to know the charismatic Dr Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary fighting to overthrow the imperial dynasty of China. And more scandalous still, she reveals her connection to the case of an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction." TAN: He does. And yet people are aware of this tendency of his, and yet they still feel inclined to spill their guts to him. In one of his nonfiction writings, he mentioned that, after he wrote some of his short stories, a lot of people were very angry with him for writing about them and not even bothering to change their identities. But there were also a lot of people who were even more angry that he did not write about them.

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”. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. I thought I didn’t have to do much research for this one,” says Tan, who was born in Penang and whose parents lived on Armenian Street in the 1950s. The House of Doors is set during Britain’s colonial rule of Malaya, and your other novels have been located in the early or mid-20th century. What is it about that time period that interests you? With three-dimensional memorable characters ….Eng’s depiction of their relationships— particularly between Lesley and Willie is masterly.I have not read Maugham’s The Casaurina Tree. I’m not sure if reading it would have deepened my appreciation for this book. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors makes an undeniably compelling tale out of one of the 20th century’s greatest political convulsions, while mixing it with a piece of literary history that is just as complex and beguiling. William Somerset Maugham’s short stories are still popular today, but his initial popularity in literary London relied much on his travels to Asia and the Far East in the Twenties. 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. As a novel, however, it was less successful for me. The writing is functional and pared down, with occasional bursts of poetry. These tend to arrive at the end of chapters where the author has the strange habit of pausing scenes to have characters stare impassively at a patch of nature, contemplating eternity. For example:The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong by W. Somerset Maugham (William Heinemann, 1930) Lesley cut in before he could reply. ‘I’m meeting the church bazaar ladies today, and I have errands to run in town afterwards.’

Because I was writing about Maugham writing his stories, I felt I had to follow his lead. But I found that restrictive and it just did not work for me. Eventually I abandoned that idea, and then the writing just opened up. It’s been eye-opening,” Tan says of the judging process. “I discovered a lot of books that I thought… Wow… these books should be more widely known.” Tan Twan Eng writes pleasing evocative novels but sometimes I think they are a little too subdued for my taste. Think languid rather than electrifying.The former Kuala Lumpur lawyer first burst onto the global literary scene with his 2007 debut novel, The Gift of Rain, which was set in Penang during the Japanese occupation that heralded the end of British rule. Long-listed for the Booker, it inevitably drew comparisons with the work of fellow Malaysian writer Tash Aw whose first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was set in Penang on the brink of occupation and had also been long-listed for the prize two years before. The doors spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth. SHAPIRO: So what makes Penang such a good vein for a fiction writer to tap, and specifically a writer of historical fiction?