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BG 1 & 2 – March 22nd 2024 Review - Joint meeting
“The House of Doors” by Tan Twan Eng
The House of Doors is an elaborate, beautifully written novel about memory, marriage, desire, and storytelling.
For two weeks in 1921, W. Somerset Maugham and his secretary-lover Gerald Haxton stayed with the Hamlyns at their estate. Maugham has just discovered that all his investments have vaporized and that he must quickly write a work popular enough to salvage his finances. Lesley Hamlyn gives him the material for the volume that will be his financial lifeline.
The stories that Maugham supposedly writes while visiting the Hamlyns, which are included in the bestselling volume The Casuarina Tree (published in 1926), are about love outside of marriage and loves that lead to violence. The setting is the British colonial society of Malaya, rife with a sense of cultural superiority and ruled by strict social norms. Hypocrisy was one of Maugham’s principal themes. Eng’s novel, more complex and elegantly written than Maugham’s work, focuses on layers of secrets that both threaten and sustain marriages.
Eng alternates the first-person recollections of Lesley with Maugham’s experiences, written in the third-person narrative style he favoured. Where Maugham always saw his characters from a satirical, superior distance, always attuned to social hypocrisy, Eng sees the various lies, secrets, and silences as part of a complex pattern of love and loyalty.
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