On the night of 23 April 1911, Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia. She claimed the victim, William Steward, had arrived unannounced and attempted to kiss her. But her trial pointed to a deeper story, one that lifted the lid on the culture that spawned it. Proudlock was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator. Her rumoured infidelity, combined with her concealed mixed-race background, made her a pariah. The killing was seen as almost the least of her crimes.
The Proudlock scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, that pitiless chronicler of so much human frailty. It now provides the prompt for Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, an ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions that beats back to the humid heyday of empire and instals the bestselling author as a flawed player in the drama. “We will be remembered through our stories,” Maugham declares at one point. He speaks with the bland self-assurance of a man who invariably writes the final draft.
In print, on the page, Maugham presented himself as anonymous and dispassionate; a confidante in the shadows recording the confessions of others. The truth was more knotty. At the time of his travels through the Federated Malay States, he was borderline bankrupt, in flight from a sham marriage and accompanied by his rackety lover, Gerald Haxton. Tan takes the famous writer – “Willie” to his friends – and folds him amid the transplanted high society of Penang, a guest at the home of well-to-do Robert and Lesley Hamlyn. Lesley disapproves of Maugham’s lifestyle but sympathises with his plight. It is she who will tell him what befell Ethel Proudlock.
The House of Doors is Tan’s first novel since 2012’s Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists and shares many of its themes. It’s a book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy that sideslips through the decades and passes the narrative baton between Lesley and Maugham. While Tan – born in Penang of Straits Chinese descent – is deliberately writing in the voice of the oppressor, he generally does so with care, conscious of the limits of his characters’ language and worldview. If colonial Malaysia is a pastiche of middle-class England, his drama is its costumed morality play.
Like Maugham, though, Tan’s tale carries a good deal of luggage. The sheer weight of its interests sometimes slows it down. The House of Doors is by turns a portrait of the artist in crisis, a meditation on how and why we tell stories and a heated courtroom drama, spotlighting the Proudlock affair. It’s also a political saga of sorts, charting Lesley’s journey towards self-empowerment and embrace of social activism. Tan tinkers with the timeframe to align the Proudlock trial with the arrival in Penang of Sun Yat-sen, another true-life figure, who dreams of overthrowing the emperor and establishing a republic in China. Sun, in his way, is as much a storyteller as Maugham. But his revolutionary adventure feels undercooked and imported. We view it via Lesley, the white colonial wife, and her vision of events is partial and obscured.
Revitalised by his travels through the far east, in 1926 Maugham published a collection of stories, The Casuarina Tree, which outraged his hosts and restored his bank balance. His straight-backed formal prose framed the emotional tumult of the English expats, exposing a colonial society that was provisional and precarious; stitched on to the tropics and at risk of collapse. The secret of finding good stories, Tan has the author explain to a local reporter, comes from travelling widely and gaining people’s trust: “A man is more willing to open up to you once you’ve revealed something personal, something shameful about yourself.” But his careful exchange was really a bait-and-switch scam. In practice, Maugham exploited the secrets of his subjects while keeping his own forever out of print.
No doubt he’d have bridled at how Tan paints him here. He’s as compromised and contorted as anyone in his fiction: struggling with a stammer and presenting a public front to the world; lugging his monogrammed cases from one rest stop to the next. In all other respects, though, he’d probably approve of the story and hear his own voice in its pages. Tan writes as Maugham did, almost self-consciously so, in a descriptive high style that focuses on the tales people tell and how they look when they tell them. Smiles variously wither and blot. Residues of sadness stain faces. Casual expressions are draped. If Tan’s antiquated constructions call attention to themselves, I think that’s partly the point. Everyone in this drama is wearing an ill-fitting mask. Sooner or later they are liable to unhook and slip loose.
• The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
