The House of Doors is a novel by Tan Twan Eng, published in 2023 and long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize.

Lesley Hamlyn, a widow living alone in South Africa, takes delivery of an old book of Somerset Maugham short stories, called The Casuarina Tree. This sends Lesley back in her memories to 1921, when Maugham, a friend of her husband, stayed with the Hamlyns in Penang, Malaya. Travel for Maugham served as an escape from an unhappy marriage, a chance to conduct an affair with his secretary Gerald Haxton in relative safety, and an opportunity to gather material for his work. Lesley told the visiting writer lots of stories, from her own, and other people’s lives, some of which appeared in The Casuarina Tree.

A novel about a famous writer does naturally invite comparisons. Before reading The House of Doors, I read The Casuarina Tree. One of the most striking differences between the two was the ‘voice’ of the books. In The House of Doors, a character says something along the lines of ‘I remember as if it were yesterday’. And then we’re supposed to believe that the ensuing prose, with dialogue and fancy descriptive passages, is their spoken account. When people in The Casuarina Tree tell stories, they do so in their own voice, rather than that of a novelist. In comparison with Maugham’s straight forward style, The House of Doors felt a little forced.

Nevertheless there’s much in The House for Doors that I did enjoy. Let’s start with the setting of Penang, a fascinating, tolerant, easy-going city, where all kinds of people from Asia and Europe rub along together. Ironically, Penang, for a while at least, also provides safe harbour to Chinese revolutionaries who are uncomfortable with different people rubbing along together. They disapprove of the ‘Straits Chinese’ – Chinese migrants who have intermarried with people in the Malay Peninsula. Tolerant places can find themselves in the hazardous position of tolerating people who are temperamentally intolerant. One of the many stories Lesley tells Maugham involves a man who collects decorated local doors, which hang, disembodied from walls, in his personal door museum. If Penang has a door between itself and the outside world, then it’s this kind of suspended door, lovely to look at, but maybe not offering the sort of five lever mortice deadlock that an insurance company might require. Interestingly the owner of the door museum, a Maugham fan, decorates the actual front door of his eccentric door repository with Maugham’s personal symbol, placed at the beginning of his books. This is a hamsa, found on travels in Morocco by his father, a Moorish symbol to bring good luck and ward off the evil eye. The hamsa seeks security, and seeing it on the museum door had me thinking about the contradictions of security. A sanctuary is not necessarily found by slamming the door and bolting it shut. And yet, there are also risks in leaving the door open, giving entry to intolerant people who might endanger a tolerant place.

In the end, however, I think The House of Doors comes down on the side of doors which are appreciated for their beauty rather than for their reinforced hinges, spy holes and strike plates. I think if Maugham had been able to read The House of Doors, he would have enjoyed the fact that now his secrets could finally be fictionalised by another author, without risk of career-ending scandal and imprisonment.

Money, by Martin Amis, published in 1984, tells the story of John Self, a London advertising man, brought up partly in America, partly in a London pub called the Shakespeare. He’s a monstrous consumer of junk food, cigarettes, alcohol and pornography. His ad campaigns sell the virtues of products like the Rumpburger. John Self is a tough, nasty bloke who throws his weight and his money around. John, however, has one weakness. There is something in him that wants a finer, better life. This leaves him vulnerable to those who would exploit people who think there is a finer, better life to be had.

John has a fancy that his experience of growing up in the Shakespeare would make a good film. A New York film producer apparently believes in this dream. John Self is now as vulnerable as a young writer seeing an ad for a vanity publisher promising bestsellerdom for a fee.

John’s tough and diffident search for a better life is extremely funny. I tried to suppress the laughter because, firstly, I was laughing so often, I thought this might be unsettling for anyone close by. Secondly, a lot of the stuff making me laugh wasn’t actually a laughing matter. So I spent most of my time reading Money in a state of painful suppression, which risked triggering an asthma attack, or maybe causing damage to sinuses, or the inner ear.

When I wasn’t trying to stifle laughter, I was also enjoying the book on a thoughtful level, For all its downmarket strut and swagger, Money is an interesting reflection on the nature of culture. There’s energy in the low brow culture that John goes in for. This is lacking in the high arts to which his posh New York girlfriend, Martina, tries to introduce him. But even as John makes his effort at self improvement, we begin to feel that maybe the gulf he is trying to cross isn’t so wide. John grew up in the Shakespeare. If any cultural icon serves to remind us that high brow often starts out low brow, it is Shakespeare.

Martina has a German shepherd dog called Shadow, who she rescued from the streets. Shadow loves his cosy apartment, soft dog bed and kindly lady owner. But taking him for a walk is a risk, because this conflicted animal still wants to run back to his old haunts. John, during his time with Martina, is in exactly the same position. Even though he enjoys his comfortable life, visiting art galleries and opera houses, a crazy hankering for his former existence remains. This opposition makes the book. It is a cultural artefact that combines low and high, leaving me exhausted, a bit wheezy and morally perturbed in the ambivalent, in-between place where the best art has a chance of being made

The Casaurina Tree is a collection of Somerset Maugham short stories, published in 1926. They are all set in the 1920s, amongst the British community of what was then the Federated Malay States.

These stories are from a different time, when, particularly in British terms, the world was bigger. I wasn’t very well when I read them, not getting around much. This made it all the more pleasurable to find myself taking long sea voyages, to places where London newspapers are always six weeks out of date. And yet, ironically, the personalities inhabiting these stories have a characteristically small outlook, which strives to never leave England.

I think my favourite story was The Outstation. This little gem was about Mr Warburton, a peripheral member of an old English family, who in his youth frittered away an inheritance, keeping up appearances in card games, and making loans to hard up noblemen, knowing it was bad form to expect the money back. Accepting his losses like a good sport, and not having ever had a proper job, he decides to disappear into colonial administration. By the 1920s Warburton is sitting in his remote outstation in Malaya, fondly recalling a lost aristocratic England, and having to deal with Mr Cooper, who arrives to assist in the station’s duties. Cooper is a man who lacks refinement, but does his job well, a representative of brash, modern meritocracy.

And then we get the really interesting part. Cooper is harsh with his Malay staff. Warburton advises more respect. Things do not go well when Cooper ignores him. In this section of the story we see that Warburton has come to love Malaya and its people because Malay society is old, with long established family lines and traditions. It is actually similar to old, aristocratic, pre-First World War Britain in that respect. Warburton has gone to Malaya, and in doing so, he unexpectedly comes home. The story was a moving combination of leaving and homecoming, loss and recovery.

All the stories revolve around this sort of contradiction, with perhaps The Outstation, for me anyway, as the definitive expression of the theme. The stories are about a specific community, wider changes in British society and identity in the 1920s, and finally, meditations on the contradictory human desire to seek both change and familiarity.