Tan Twan Eng, House of Doors, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Central Meaning
Tan’s House of Doors is a lovely book. It is a 300 page prose ode to W. Somerset Maugham, it is a piece of historical fiction, and it reads a bit like a detective novel, but one that only slightly misleads you in the process of solving the various little secrets that it teases you with, so that there is a very satisfying feeling on finishing it that you have had a good, nutritious meal that delivered on its promise of opening a door to a new and intriguing world, gave you a tour, and returned you home safe and sound.
The novel begins and ends in South Africa, 1947, in a remote
and lonely outpost – a home in a barren but beautiful landscape. A package is delivered to the widow, Leslie,
who lives there – a book addressed to her instead of to her recently deceased husband
to whom most of the books sent here are addressed. The book bears no inscription, but instead
has an illustration on the front page.
Who sent the book, who inscribed it and what its message contains is the
first of many mysteries in this book.
Then we are sent back in time, to Malaysia in the 1920s and
we are invited into Leslie’s home that she shares with her husband Robert and
they are entertaining his old friend “Willie” Maugham, and we think we have
solved the riddle. Ah, we think, it must
have been Willie who sent the book. Of
course it isn’t, but like in most mysteries, our thinking we have solved the
problem allows us to shelve the question enough to turn to how the narrator will pave
a path to the conclusion where the book will be revealed to be from Willie and
what the delivery means.
Of course, the path becomes twisted in a variety of ways –
including that we are thrust further back in time – to before the first world
war – as Leslie tells the story of a real murder mystery – the first murder trial
of a British citizen in the Malay states – the murder trial of a married woman
whom, we know through Leslie, but the authorities don’t know, killed not just a
member of her social circle, but the lover she committed adultery with – a married
man who was continuing to want to have contact with her. Again, our inside information gives us enough
satisfaction to think we understand what happened, but, as with the package, we
have a nagging sense that we don’t know the full story.
At its core, this novel is about writing and about being a
writer and about being a writer with a secret – a big, dangerous, but very
important secret. The mysteries at the
heart of it, are then, revelatory of what it means to have and keep a
secret. The writer who is the ostensible
subject of the novel is, of course, W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham, as apparently accurately portrayed
here, was a closeted gay man, married to a beard in England while he roamed the
world with his “secretary”, who was also his lover. Maugham moved from place to place,
discovering the secret stories of people in these places and broadcasting them
to the world in the form of short stories, often exposing the subjects in the
process, not even bothering to hide their names.
The stories of other people catapulted Maugham to fame and
great fortune. Like a vulture, he moved
from place to place and like the physician he was trained to be (and like an
analyst), he knew that silence was the best way to get people to tell their
stories. When people felt listened to - heard – they poured out their experience in ways that allowed him to craft
descriptions of events and invent the minds that produced them in ways that
hypnotized his readers, appealed to their prurient interests, and made them
hungry to read more.
Leslie knew all this about Willie, but confided in him
anyway. Or apparently she did. She changed some of the names to protect herself,
but some of her protection was incumbent on Willie’s need to protect himself. Even though her portion of the story is told
in first person (the author chose to write the segments told from Maugham’s
perspective in the third person), we don't know, any more than she does, what
her motives here are. Partially she,
like Maugham, is telling another person’s story – the story of a murder where
she was the confidant of the murderess, but she is also telling her own, very
buttoned up British story, about being the daughter of colonists, being caught up in
being attracted to a worldly older man from England, having two children together,
growing apart from him, discovering his adulterous relationship and retaliating –
or engaging out of loneliness – in her own.
On the one hand, then, this is a perfectly ordinary – and therefore
fascinating story of a marriage between two people who are clearly very fond of
each other, with shared interests, including in the lives of each other, but
they grow apart across time and lose interest in each other. How does this happen? What does it feel
like? What is the emotional landscape of
the most privileged people in the world, living in a very civilized society
that depends on their management and exploitation of the people they live
amongst who serve them? A central
question that emerges is, ‘Why aren’t these people happy – and, given that they
are not, what stands in the way of their happiness?’
The symmetry of this book offers a clue to the author’s
intent in writing it. He opens with many
more mysteries and clues to solve them than I can or should detail here (especially
if you haven’t read the book, I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you). By the end of the book, he make sure that each
mystery is nicely solved. We are solidly
in the know. But are we?
Perhaps the central mystery of this book is who is the author? Why has a native Malay, now exiled to Africa,
chosen to write about the private life of Willie and, more particularly,
Leslie? I think the symmetry of the books
opening and closing with so many secrets, like the opening and closing of parentheses,
speaks to a kind of mirroring – I will ask and you will answer the questions
that I pose. I think Tan is taking us on
as interlocutors. We ask these questions
that he creates for us, and he provides the answers, but I think he is also
asking these questions of his characters: who are you and how do you manage to
navigate the choppy waters of your times?
It was not surprising to me to discover that Tan, like
Willie, is a closeted gay man. To be
open about one’s sexuality in a Muslim dominant country is not safe. So, it makes sense that he would turn to
Willie for answers. But his invention of
Leslie is also important. Her marriage
decays in part because her husband takes on a male lover. To what extent is his disinterest
sexual? How does she keep herself alive while
being spurned not just for whom she has made herself to be, but for how she was
made? And how does it feel to be trapped
in that self – one that she cannot escape in her relationship with her husband,
but also one that she cannot escape by divorcing him. She is no more able to leave him than the
murderess is able to leave her husband in a society that shuns its divorcees…
Leslie trusts that Willie will not publicize her – he will
not tell her story because it is too close to his own. To tell her story might wake people up
(including Willie’s wife) to the hidden life he is leading. She trusts him to keep her secret because it is
his own. In a literally luminescent
moment in the middle of the novel, after she has revealed herself to Willie and
has ascertained his secrets, they strip off their clothes together to swim among
bioluminescent algae, and Willie swims deeply into the ocean to pull Leslie
back to the surface when she is headed down, into the deep.
I think that Tan is imagining himself as Leslie – the name
that Maugham substitutes for the actual murdering adulterer in his short story
The Letter. Tan is, then, in this
construction, feeling his way into living a life that he can be proud of, even
though it is unacceptable to his culture and, in a very deep and personal way,
himself. He is crying out to be rescued
from the deep and pulled to the surface.
I think this book is compelling and deeply moving because it
is, like all good mysteries, a disguised version of reality. One in which we can’t quite see what is
plainly evident to our eyes – the clues that allow us to solve the mystery of not just whodunit, but why they did, and how, and what it was that they were
doing – figuring out how to live when shackled with unbearable circumstances. We come to identify with them and, as Willie (and Tan) do with Leslie, appreciate them for who they are and the judgement that we
pass on them is a charitable one. We
find ourselves reassured that the central wish, to be loved for whom one truly
is, can be realized.
