Maugham, Mayhem and Murder in Colonial Penang

Somerset Maugham’s visit to Penang in 1921 forms the basis of Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors. (Portrait of William Somerset Maugham by Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons)

Fact is a poor storyteller, wrote Somerset Maugham in the introduction to a collection of his short stories. “It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion.”

In many of his tales drawn from facts, Maugham cleared up loose ends and provided conclusions – some would say rather too neatly. Take ‘The Letter’, published in 1926 and based on an incident that he heard about during his travels in the colonial Far East.

The real-life story revolved around Ethel Proudlock, the wife of a school principal in Kuala Lumpur who was accused of shooting dead a local mine manager. She claimed that the man entered her bungalow while her husband was out to dinner and tried to sexually assault her.

The inconsistencies and inconvenient details that emerged during her trial electrified the insular British community. As Maugham was to put it: “The case was the sensation of the day, and it was discussed in all the clubs, at all the dinner tables, up and down the Peninsula, from Singapore to Penang.”

These incidents, and Maugham’s own visit to Penang in 1921, form the basis of Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors. It’s his first novel since The Garden of Evening Mists, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize and went on to win the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

The House of Doors also deals with another historical character, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen. To accommodate this, Eng clarifies that though Ethel Proudlock’s murder trial took place in 1911, he set it in 1910 to coincide with Sun Yat Sen’s extended stay in Penang.

The connective tissue between Maugham and Sun Yat Sen is the fictional Leslie Hamlyn, a British expatriate who lives in Penang with her barrister husband. The book proceeds in sections that alternate between Leslie’s point of view and Maugham’s experiences.

The celebrated author, who happens to be an old friend of Leslie’s husband, stays with them at their colonial bungalow and spends his time writing and soaking up local colour. As the days pass, she narrates the story of Ethel, her friend in Kuala Lumpur accused of murder, and of her role in the trial.

Maugham’s visit coincides with Leslie’s concerns over the health of her husband and whether this will mean leaving her beloved Penang for good. She finds herself circling back to the time she was caught up by Sun Yat Sen’s charisma when he visited the region to solicit funds for his group’s revolutionary activities.

This is a lot for a novel to encompass, especially one that is a shade over 300 pages. Indeed, there are times when each section can come across as standing on its own without integrating into a larger whole. There are resonances, however, especially the prods of memory and expectation and the marital circumstances of Maugham, Leslie and Ethel. These are the central courtyard, so to speak, of this house of doors and provide a unifying heft to the novel without being heavy-handed.

The fictional Maugham is a mixture of vanity and empathy, coolness and desire, especially in his dealings with Gerald Haxton, his lover who travels with him as his secretary, and his wife Syrie, whom he leaves behind in London. Eng dutifully records Maugham’s other attributes: the stammer, the fond maternal memories, and the habit of scribbling observations in a notebook during his travels.

The not inconsiderable strength of The House of Doors lies in its evocation of images and attitudes from another century. Eng vividly portrays the bustling streets and gossipy expatriate gatherings of Penang with details of food, clothing, and architecture, accompanied by prevailing social dynamics and prejudices.

On this painted veil, “the faint, medicinal scent of the old teakwood floors” mingles with “the fragrance of the star jasmine from the garden” and gold-leafed Chinese calligraphy glows in the shadows like “candle flame glimpsed through clouds of smoke”. Outdoors, coconut fronds cast “fish-skeleton shadows on the soft, fine sand” and the “pungent, salty tang of the mudflats at low tide” clogs the nostrils, while the surface of the emerald sea is “chipped with a million white scratches”.

To read the novel is to be immersed in the sights and sounds of this vanished world. Like the gin cocktails that Maugham frequently mentions in his own work, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors is an intoxicating blend that bears the aroma of a bygone time.