Second paragraph of third story in The Casuarina Tree (“The Outstation”):
Now the prahu [boat] appeared in the broad reach. It was manned by prisoners, Dyaks under various sentences, and a couple of warders were waiting on the landing-stage to take them back to jail. They were sturdy fellows, used to the river, and they rowed with a powerful stroke. As the boat reached the side a man got out from under the attap awning and stepped on shore. The guard presented arms.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The House of Doors:
‘I have read your book, Mr Willie,’ said Ah Keng.
I enjoyed both of the previous books that I read by Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists and The Gift of Rain. Like The Gift of Rain, his latest, The House of Doors, is mainly set in Penang, which is a place of fascination for me as it is where my grandparents met and my father was born. As I started The House of Doors, I realised that it rather depends on knowledge of Somerset Maugham, one of many well-known writers whose works I had never read, so I got hold of The Casuarina Tree, his collection of short stories set in Malaysia, and finished it before I finished The House of Doors (it is slightly shorter).
The Casuarina Tree, published in 1926, is not one of Maugham’s best known books – it’s not in his top twenty according to Goodreads or even in his top forty, according to LibraryThing. But it is set in Malaya after Maugham’s visits there in 1921 and 1925, six short stories of between 34 and 45 pages each, with a prologue and afterword. They are all about expats with dreadful secrets, whose character flaws may become public or may remain hidden, with the moral depravity of the English brutally exposed as a result of contact with the human and physical geography of Malaysia.
The most successful of the stories is “The Letter”, based on the real case of Ethel Proudlock who shot and killed her English neighbour who, she claimed, was attempting to rape her. But they are all effective, brutal vignettes of colonial life.
Supposedly Maugham became persona non grata in Penang because too many of the episodes that the stories are based on were recognisable. That sounds like a marketing myth to me – they may just not have liked him very much. Anyway, you can buy The Casuarina Tree here, though it’s easy to find for free on the internets.
There is one person who pops up both in The House of Doors and in my grandmother’s memoirs of Penang a few years later, the lawyer Hastings Rhodes, who was the state prosecutor in Ethel Proudlock’s trial in 1911 and then hosted my grandmother for dinner just after she and my grandfather got engaged in 1927. She reports that “Hastings Rhodes drove me home and professed to be heart-broken at my engagement, but I took that with several grains of salt.” He was recently divorced, and the same age as my grandfather, and died unexpectedly in 1929.
The House of Doors is about Lesley Hamlyn, living in an unsatisfactory marriage with her husband in Penang in 1921, and hosting her husband’s old schoolfriend Willie Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald Haxton, while also looking back on her own friendship with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen ten years before, and coming to the realisation that both she and her husband are emotionally involved with Chinese men. There is a framing narrative set in South Africa, and Ethel Proudlock’s murder trial gets a look in too.
There is a lot here, and I didn’t think that Tan Twan Eng juggled the balls of plot and character as well as in his other books. When a story is based on real events, authors sometimes let their imagination get fettered by the historical record, and I felt that had happened here. Oddly enough Maugham, the person about whom most is known, comes across as the most well-rounded of the characters, while Lesley, the ostensible protagonist, felt a bit flat to me. But other people seem to like it, so perhaps I was just in the wrong mood. You can get The House of Doors here.
