...lushly atmospheric ... Landscapes are filled with screeching wild monkeys, fragrant frangipani flowers, and whispering casuarina trees, which later provide the title for Maugham's 1926 short story collection set in Malay. Tan's verbs are aerobically active: a breeze pawed at the curtains of Gerald's room; wind frisked the upper branches of trees; dusk rouged the sky; the morning decanted its light down distant mountain slopes. But too often — particularly at the end of chapters — Tan goes too far, beyond rouge to purple ... There's much to untangle and savor in this exquisite novel ... I was struck by Tan's audaciousness in manipulating Maugham's stories in the interests of literature in much the same way that Maugham himself had fed his fiction by manipulating the stories people told him during his travels ... Tan has pulled off not just a captivating novel, but an ingenious twist that explores how literature works its magic.
About a third of the way along, the novel finally picks up some momentum. After the tantalizing prologue, it’s a letdown to get 80 pages of heavy hinting about secret loves and the silences that seep into an unhappy marriage without any specifics. Atmospheric but awkwardly inserted passages ... It’s a neat wrap-up, followed by the resolution of a mystery left over from Ethel’s trial and the promise of a new beginning for Lesley. The epilogue, like the chapters that precede it, is solid, well-crafted, and perhaps a little too tidily plotted.
A kind of biblio-fiction ... An assemblage, a house of curiosities. Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact ... In the same vein, Eng’s narrative can take on a tone of blandly fictionalized biography ... These relationships and encounters lack the power and the narrative emphasis of the central Ethel Proudlock story, which casts an enviably dramatic shadow over the whole book. And the subversions are too gentle, so that Eng’s portrait of Somerset Maugham and his colonial world has neither the rotten pungency of satire nor quite the vitality of a truly fresh realism.
Captivating ... One of the pleasures of this book is seeing him turn the cultural tables, as he uses Maugham’s biography for his own purposes and expertly skewers (not without sympathy) the myopic and privileged colonists ... His prose is elegant and sometimes exquisite, headily evoking the sights and sounds of a distant time and place ... The novel’s epilogue, which takes place in 1947, halfway around the world from Penang, wraps things up with a couple of big revelations. One of them hits the mark, but I found the other a little unsatisfying, as if Mr. Tan’s estimable powers of invention had temporarily flagged and he was in too much of a hurry to finish to revive them. I predict this gripe will fade in my mind over time and I’ll remember The House of Doors for its smart cross-cultural excursions and its indelible images.
Secrets abound ... Don’t worry about getting lost in this novel’s maze. Eng employs masterful control, and we follow his thread to a satisfying ending ... Emerging, I sought out Maugham’s stories, attuned to the damage caused by colonialism and concealment, and to the risks and rewards of spilling one’s guts to a snuffling writer.
A book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy ... 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.
Outstanding ... Eng ingeniously inserts a further shocking twist. But what most gives his novel its grip is his masterly conjuring up of Maugham’s imaginative world and the steamy tropic latitudes in which it burgeoned ... Occasionally the prose becomes overclamorous ... Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham’s life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work.
What elevates Eng’s book is the sheer beauty of his writing – restrained, elegant, precise, every detail accurate, every line considered. Pain, loss and disappointment seep from every page, as do beauty and compassion ... Elegant.
For a novel about desire and revolutionary politics, the tone of The House of Doors is surprisingly cool: The moral complexities of a colonial society are hidden behind a veneer of restraint and manners. Tan’s eye for detail and understated storytelling bring a subtle edge to this thoughtfully written, atypical historical novel that searches for the emotional truth behind the facts.
Another novelist might have turned this sorry tale into a pacy courtroom thriller. But...Tan Twan Eng crafts it as an elegant meditation on oppression, repression and loneliness ... Moving between verandas and garden parties with limpid grace, The House of Doors pays tribute to storytelling itself as a means not just of memorializing, but recreating. Just as Somerset Maugham put his own spin on the Proudlock case, so too does Tan, the facts of the scandal dimming beneath yet another layer of finely-grained fiction. Yet he resists casting his own story in the retrospective light of atonement with which Anglophone writers often view colonial history. Imbued with quiet yearning, this a pleasurably old-fashioned novel, yet in a sense a radical one: it contains characters who are unrepentant products of empire with whom we can entirely sympathize.
For a story so suffused with matters of sex, violence, and long-running resentment, the novel operates at a surprisingly low boil and is mannered almost to a fault. Some of that effect is a tactic, Eng evoking Maugham’s subdued style in understated revelations of secret lives, and the writing is graceful and well-researched. Still, the novel at times labors to capture the passions that consume its characters’ lives. A restrained look at a society working to keep up appearances.
