All in Penang in 1921 :: 'The House of Doors'

It was such a pleasant surprise when I was skipped ahead in the NLB reservation waitlist and got to borrow the digital copy of Tan Tan Eng's 'The House of Doors' (May 2023). This was way ahead of my original 69th place in the queue. The catch is — I gotta return it in seven days and there was no renewal. I was thrilled. THANKS. I read fast anyway and returned it the next afternoon. 

This is the author's first novel in ten years, and it's on the longlist of The Booker Prize. Now, this is a genre alien to me. I'm almost always bored. I confess, I was bored through the stories. The writing is decent, mind you, and the author has re-imagined the characters in a most interesting manner. But this is a very boring colonial era that I'm not particularly fond of. And I'm not too hot about the author's excellent writing style, which many have appreciated. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

We go to Malaya's Penang in 1921 and 1922 with the Hamlyn family at their Cassowary House. We have barrister Robert Hamlyn who seems successful and respected, and his wife Lesley Hamlyn who was a music teacher and after marriage, is now a society hostess; she was born and bred in the Straits Settlements, and speaks fluent Malay and Hokkien. Their two sons are schooling back in boarding school in England. The Prologue and Epilogue are set in 1947 in South Africa, told through Lesley’s eyes. The first ten chapters moved really slowly, with two narrators setting it all up. 

The author took a time leap and weaved an intersecting timeline between writer W. Somerset Maugham and Chinese revolutionary leader Dr Sun Yat-Sen. The author also utilized the actual murder trial of Ethel Proudlock in 1911 but pushing it earlier to 1910. This trial eventually became the fictionalized in Somerset Maugham's 'The Letter', published as a short story in collection titled 'The Casuarina Tree' (1926). (Literature students, we would have had to read this story at some point too.) But this book is still fiction, all fiction. Although we get a first hand invitation to view the society in that era, how the characters would think, what they would do, and how they lived.

Love, losses, friendship, duty, obligations and social norms in colonial times, et cetera. All these against the backdrop of the Chinese revolution that fell the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The issues of race aren't so prominent in here, although the angst of identity is. At the end, I understood the author’s choice of this title — The House of Doors. It’s an actual house and venue in the story. It also alludes to the choices the final narrator Lesley has made, and the doors she has opened and closed to be where she is in 1947. When Robert passed on in the winter of 1938 in South Africa, Lesley, only in her fifties, made a choice not to return to Penang, and stayed on in South Africa. Till a book arrived.  

The story ended with the Epilogue narrated by Lesley, and this paragraph,

The night is vast and still. My breaths hang in the air like clouds of moondust. I lift my face, searching out the familiar patterns sequinned into the night sky. For a long time I stand there in that great hall of the temple of stars. I should go back to sleep, I tell myself. I have to get up early. There are many tasks to do in the coming days and weeks — travel arrangements to make, things to hold on to, and things to let go of.

But first there is a letter I must write and send, a letter to Arthur, waiting for me in the House of Doors. 

Here, on the margins of the desert, it is just gone midnight, but as I turn towards the east, turning with the rotation of the earth, I know that, on an island on the other side of the world, it is already morning.