Mind Picker: The House of Doors

My body felt very light, almost weightless, as I turned towards him. In the silence we looked at each other, each waiting for the other to speak, to move.

“The House of Doors,” I said softly.

I haven’t read Tan Twan Eng before, so I can’t really say if The House of Doors is typical of his work, but honestly, I just found it dull. Combining a few real life historical events — an in-its-day shocking murder trial, the in-exile revolutionary efforts of China’s Sun Yat Sen, Somerset Maugham’s world travels in search of subject matter for his next bestseller — and overlaying each strand with melodramatic love stories, I wasn’t moved or entertained by any of it. I can see that others really loved this, and it has caught the attention of literary juries, so I have no problem admitting that my experience was not typical. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Below my wedding portrait hangs a photograph of two women, their blouses and frocks and hats quaintly old-fashioned, from another age: Ethel and me, each with a rifle in our hands, the mock-Tudor façade of the Spotted Dog in Kuala Lumpur looming behind us.The photograph had been taken after a shooting competition on the padang. Poor, poor Ethel. My eyes glide to the photograph next to it. I unhook it and study it in the light of the windows. Looking at the four of us – Willie Maugham and Gerald and Robert and myself – lounging in our rattan chairs under the casuarina tree in the garden, my mind loops back to the two weeks in 1921 when the writer and his secretary had stayed with us at Cassowary House. I put down the photograph. The morning is decanting its light down the slopes of the far mountains. It is the autumn equinox today; here, in the southern bowl of the earth, the portions of day and night are exactly equal. The world is at an equilibrium, but I myself feel unsteady, off-balance.

As the novel opens with a prologue set in 1947, one of our two narrators, Lesley Doornfontein, is living in South Africa and has received a first edition copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree. This mysteriously inscribed collection of stories sends her mind back to 1921, when she and her husband were living in the Malaysian state of Penang and had played host to “Willie” Maugham and his secretary/companion Gerald Haxton. Maugham himself is the second narrator, and between what he shares about the economic and domestic pressures he was under at the time, and the story that Lesley tells him about her role in the infamous Ethel Proudlock Case, we get to watch as the desperate author mines the lives of others for his fiction (in this case, turning the story his hostess tells him into the short story The Letter). While Lesley willingly unburdens herself of the secrets she had been keeping for her one-time friend, Maugham also probes her for details of the affair Lesley herself had been having at the time; and when it comes out that just about everyone has affairs and secret lovers, it is concluded more than once that “Every marriage has its own rules.”

From the beginning, I found the writing a little overblown, and I wondered if Tan was trying to emulate Maugham’s own old-fashioned vernacular. When Maugham first meets with his old friend Robert (Lesley’s husband), he notes to himself, “The thick head of hair Robert once possessed was gone, the dome of his head now a depilated basilica, with just a narrow fringe of sparse grey hair above his ears. He hadn’t recognised his old friend’s voice either — the resplendent baritone he used to envy had shrivelled to a querulous, fissured tone.” And when Maugham meets Lesley herself, he thinks, “The corners of her mouth were slightly curled, pulled downwards by another tangle of lines, giving them an anatine look.” And I did not believe that these were in-the-moment impressions, even from a last century author. Or that non-author Lesley would have the following thoughts while skinny-dipping with Maugham in a sea of efflorescent plankton:

Like an anchor sliding from a ship, I sank beneath the surface of the sea and cleaved my way down, descending in a cocoon of light. Shadowy fishes darted around me. The water grew colder, but still I kept falling, intoxicated by the sensation that I was travelling back in time. Was it because the sea was so unmeasurably old, existing even before the firmaments had been formed to divide the waters from the waters? I was gripped by an atavistic urge to keep sinking, down and ever down into the impenetrable darkness, boring a narrow tunnel of light into the fathomless sea, nebulae burning from my fingertips, comet-fire trailing in my wake. What would happen if kept falling, all the way to the beginning of time?

Nothing about the various love stories engaged me, Lesley educating herself on Chinese history after meeting the revolutionary Sun Yat Sen felt like info-dumping, and even her story of the notorious murder trial of her “friend” Ethel Proudlock was doled out so slowly and matter-of-factly that it lacked the expected narrative tension of a courtroom drama (reading The Letter was a much more satisfying experience and there is something interesting in seeing how Tan imagined Maugham turned the one into the other).

We sat there in the silence, our true thoughts camouflaged from each other. What sustained a marriage, kept it going year upon year, I realised, were the things we left unmentioned, the truths that we longed to speak forced back down our throats, back into the deepest, darkest chambers of our hearts.

From Lesley and Robert’s marriage to Maugham’s relationship with Gerald to Sun Yat Sen’s polygamous partners and Ethel Proudlock’s scandal, this idea of lies and secrets sustaining every marriage seems to be the main point of The House of Doors, and that wasn’t an engaging enough thesis to keep my interest. This just wasn’t for me.