The House of Doors

This is Tan Twan Eng’s first book in over 10 years, and the long-awaited successor to his Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists. The story opens with Lesley Hamlyn, a widow seemingly stranded in the bright and open loneliness of her rural South African property. Upon receiving an unexpected gift – a book by Somerset Maugham with a peculiar inscription on the front page – she casts her mind back to her life in colonial Penang, and the events which led her to this solitary place.

This novel is, in many ways, a love letter to Penang. The wonderful specificities of its many-cultured people, architecture, history, and food are meticulously brought to life. The between-ness of the local Chinese population, after their generations of living and interacting with Malay, Indian and colonial influences. Lesley’s between-ness manifests in her position as a Penang-born white woman, with all the privilege of her race, but also with the knowledge and respect fostered by her local upbringing. Each character’s position is a brushstroke in the picture of this place – a picture which is by no means complete, but is beautiful all the same.

However steeped in its setting The House of Doors may be, it is ultimately a novel about something far more universal: it is about love. For the characters of this story, love is never a simple thing to find, and it’s an even more challenging thing to hold on to. It seems that no one can love who they are supposed to, but the connections that they do find are strong enough to cross boundaries of time, law and culture.

Like in his previous work, Tan manages to bring us moments of true beauty – scenes which the reader has never experienced, but inspire a strong surge of nostalgia nonetheless. This is a transportive and compassionate story, and a well-researched work of historical fiction.