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 I should end on a positive note because there was much in The House for Doors that I did enjoy. There was 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.