The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Thank you Canongate and NetGalley and Tan Twan Eng for this advance copy in exchange for my honest review. T ensions between the public and the private lie at the heart of Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, a novel predominantly set in Penang in 1921 and immersed in the social mores of the British Empire. Lesley Hamlyn is married to Robert, a barrister eighteen years her senior. Theirs is a polite, passionless marriage, burdened but also sustained by deep silences and long-stored secrets, the two keeping their ‘true thoughts camouflaged from each other’. What is most wonderful about this book is the lush, luxuriant descriptions of Penang, a land of ‘cloying humidity’. The sea is ‘emerald and turquoise, chipped with a million white scratches’, while on Penang Hill, ‘dragonflies with stained-glass wings stitched invisible threads in the air’. Through this deceptively lulling atmosphere, Tan has woven a superb, quietly complex tale of love, duty and betrayal. For People Who Devour Books Also, do a Google photo search on each of the particulars to familiarize oneself with what everybody looks like (it enhances one's enjoyment!) - and listen to this (which is a recurring musical motif throughout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p32vl....

Despite the differences between them Maugham finds himself drawn to Lesley and she finally tells him not only her story but that of a friend whose affair spiralled out of control with devastating consequences. The characters, unfortunately, feel a bit hollow, or like playthings for the author to dictate his story through; perhaps because Maugham is a real person and thus there's only so much creative liberty Eng can take with him—or maybe because the emphasis on playing intertextually with Maugham's works overshadowed Eng's own themes and explorations. Ironically, the one character who felt the most intriguing, Ethel, is the one we only hear about occasionally and mostly at the end of the novel. At one point, Lesley mentions to Willie that all his stories seem to be about unhappy marriages. Certainly, because of the stigma of divorce, couples stayed married regardless of their happiness and often sought out affairs instead. This plays out in this book as well. You would think with all the various love affairs and high emotions, the story would have been livelier. But sad to say, it came across as dry and lifeless to me.One of the standouts is the friendship that grows between Lesley and Willie. Lesley confides about her life in the straits — more than she thought she would tell him. And it was more than Willie expected to hear. Lesley had a personal connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yet Sen. …. The House of Doors is brilliantly observed and full of memorable characters. It is so well-written, everything so effortlessly dramatized, the narrative so well structured and paced, that this is a book that will mesmerize readers far into the future.” ―Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician Maugham is a here a passive character; he is a vessel through which we get to listen to Lesley Hamlyn’s secrets from her past. The writer proves to be an excellent listener, which prompts the disillusioned Lesley to share confidences about events surrounding the visit of the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen to Penang and a famous murder. Both the murder and the visit were real events, although the former took place in 1911. The author puts them together to serve his plotting objectives, to positive results, I think. Willie has hidden his homosexuality…..and was married to Syrie. They lived in London, had one daughter, but Willie traveled so much with his ‘secretary’ (cover-up for lover) so often he wasn’t home much.. Their marriage of convenience was unraveling.

The book does fulfill one of my desires of historical fiction, which is to teach me something I didn’t know. In this case, it’s Sun Yat-sen’s rebellion against the Qing dynasty.

Willie opened the lids of the chafing dishes. Kippers and bacon and sausages and eggs and toast, as he had expected. There were also plates of cheeses and bowls of local fruit – bananas and mangoes and starfruit. He filled only half his plate and sat down at the table. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Quiet, lazy days on … the beach, that’s all I want,’ Willie said. ‘I’ve piles … of books to read, and Gerald hasn’t fully recovered yet. He needs his rest, lots … of it.’