The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.
Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder.
...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.
