Tan Twan Eng, one of Penang’s most famous authors today, was in town in July. He granted Penang Monthly an interview at the E&O Hotel, where some key scenes in his new book are played out.
Ooi Kee Beng: Congratulations on the success of The House of Doors, Twan Eng. I imagine the experience of finishing a first book is very different from finishing a third, as a successful author.
Tan Twan Eng: Well, in the process of writing a first book, you learn subconsciously. And with the second, you become more aware of technique and of the craft.
OKB: The third book… you wrote that as a very well-established author. That must bring along its own kind of pressure.
TTE: Well, you don’t want to do a repeat. In any case, each story is different, and the characters are different. So you change your writing style to suit the characterization and the story. So there’s no fear of them being similar.
OKB: To be honest, reading “The House of Doors“, I did wonder at first where you were going to go with it. And then, suddenly, I noticed the story — and the characterization of your protagonists — had captured my imagination. I couldn’t put it down after that.
TTE: It’s not a thriller to start with. So you can’t jump straight into something exciting. As a reviewer said, the book starts off as a study of all these characters. You have to let the reader get to know them first, make them care.
OKB: I also appreciate the way you mix first-person story-telling for Lesley Hamlyn with an author’s narrative for Somerset Maugham. You were managing two stories, two worlds, coming together. I began wondering who the main protagonist is, Lesley Hamlyn or William Somerset Maugham, though. Of course, in the end, it is Lesley who captures the reader’s imagination more.
TTE: I think it is both. You have to have alternate character chapters to give each of them their own space. Originally, everything was written in the first person. I then found that it couldn’t work because I had to put in a lot of information for the reader in the Somerset Maugham chapters.
You couldn’t have a first-person telling the reader his background, where he was born, et cetera; so I shifted to third-person as well. That worked better. Somerset Maugham is more worldly. He’s seen a lot of the world whereas Lesley is confined to Penang, so her viewpoint is very narrow and easier to get across in first-person.
OKB: And you get the sense of her strongly wishing for more in her life.
TTE: Yeah, she is envious of the freedom that men have.
OKB: So, the intrusion of Sun Yat Sen into Penang society was a really big event in her life.
TTE: It taught her to look at the world differently, to understand that a woman can do so much more than she had been told was possible.
OKB: Placing her in Penang and then South Africa, are you casting yourself in her, those two places being where you have spent much of your life?
TTE: No. One of the reasons she ends up in the Great Karoo is because I wanted her, in the end, to be completely isolated, so that she doesn’t get news from the outside world. She more or less disappears, like Ethel Proudlock did in the end.
OKB: Lesley was a woman who had to sacrifice for her husband, right? She didn’t wish to leave Penang, the world she knew and loved, but her husband had to for his health. So, she went to South Africa.
TTE: After talking to Somerset Maugham over the course of many nights, she begins to view her marriage differently. She begins to understand her husband as well. The husband and wife both love each other in their own way. In the end, there is genuine warmth there.
OKB: The husband doesn’t get much space, and is, to an extent, reflected through Somerset Maugham.
TTE: He’s not the focus of the story. She is. Keeping the husband at a distance is also to make the reader feel the distance between Lesley and him.
OKB: You play with quite a few dimensions at the same time. There is the gender dimension, and then the homosexuality. And then with Somerset Maugham and his lover, you have ruthless youthfulness in full swing as well. You have very different characters pushed together. They don’t always get along because of their differences, but they are fascinated by each other. If you can keep your jealousy in check, then….
TTE: Yes! I think jealousy is the most useless emotion that we all have. Useless and destructive. If we can all get rid of jealousy, I think it makes everything so much easier. A lot of marriages are saved by silences. That’s the only way you can protect any marriage. Some things are best left unsaid. The moment you say it, then everything changes and can never be repaired.
In those days, a woman doesn’t get divorced. If she gets divorced, she’s always the one at fault and people will ostracise her.
OKB: Lesley was having a quiet and rather uneventful life. She touches Somerset Maugham’s exciting life, she touches the Chinese revolution, and then there is the dramatic court case. Three historical things that filled her life with excitement… and pain.
TTE: The storytelling had to be very controlled and subdued. She couldn’t be overly dramatic or histrionic. She is not the sort who is going to go overboard and lose control completely. She’s still very aware of how society would judge her and what she might lose. So, she makes the conditions; she sets the rules.
One of the reasons Lesley told Somerset Maugham so much about herself is that she’s also sending a message across time to the future. That story has to reach somebody who will understand what she’s trying to say. She’s actually looking years and years ahead into the future and thinking of it as the only way she can communicate across time.
OKB: Despite all the secrecy, there is still a need for her to have a history.
TTE: She’s obsessed with being remembered. I think everyone is. I think if you read it quickly, you might miss some of the layers. I’ve had a few complaints about the inclusion of Sun Yat Sen in the story. But then they missed the point. Sun Yat Sen, the revolutionary, the liberator, in his own way liberated Lesley.
OKB: Touching greatness is also something people long for.
TTE: She can feel that she helped the revolution in her own small way: “I was part of this global historical event.” Wouldn’t you feel proud if you could say that?
OKB: Lesley being a white woman also adds something to that part of the story, did you think of using an Asian in the role?
TTE: It wouldn’t have worked. Why would Somerset Maugham come to stay with a Chinese family in Penang? It wouldn’t work. A story requires certain characters. I don’t purposely think, okay, I’m only going to write about either a Malay woman or an Indian woman or Chinese woman or white woman. No, it’s about what the story needs.
The social class that she was moving in, her race, and so on… Those were the only reasons why Somerset Maugham would come stay with them. He was not going to stay with a Malay or Chinese family. It’s not possible.
OKB: Like with all your books, you are deeply sensitive in your plot — in your plotting and in your language. And in that way, you touch common sentiments in people.
TTE: It’s about how people live. We always have higher ethics and morals. But that’s very idealistic because most of the time, we can’t reach that. And we have to find a compromise, and then we justify that to ourselves. Nobody can reach these high levels of ideas or ethics. I think it’s foolish to live like that. We’re always compromising and then justifying to ourselves, you know. Maugham is a very practical man. He’s not a romantic. He’s a realist.
So his language would be more calculating, more mercenary. And Lesley is also very controlled, very repressed, so that’s how her language has to be. She’s wary of people. She is the cynical one, more than Somerset Maugham. I read all the biographies that were available about Somerset Maugham.
All of them. I read most of his short stories and his novels. He was a better short story writer than a novelist, by the way.
OKB: Did you make up certain elements about him, to fit the world you recreated for the book?
TTE: I think I made him nicer, more human. He was a secretive person, a hard person; he didn’t suffer fools.
His love, Gerald, is real, he is accurate in the book. He is also the one person most honest to himself, most authentic, and happiest. He doesn’t care what people think of him, he does whatever he wants. The other characters are always hiding. They’re always pretending and concealing. They’re not happy, they’re all not happy.
OKB: Somerset Maugham knows all this about Gerald. He knows he might get hurt time and again, and he chooses to accept it.
TTE: Both parties are open with each other, and there’s no jealousy. It’s so much more fulfilling and enriching. You have no illusions or false expectations. And you know what you’re getting with Gerald, and Gerald knows what he’s getting with Somerset Maugham.
OKB: Why did you include the murder trial? How is that important?
TTE: I wanted the trial there as a warning to Lesley of what could happen to her if she were to be open with her emotions if she were not careful.
That’s why she is so frightened, so paranoid. She sees firsthand and personally, what can happen. Also, I think the trial is very interesting to read about. Not many people know about it. I couldn’t even find the transcripts of the court case in the Malaysian national archives.
Also, the trial has to be there. I’m writing about Somerset Maugham and he did write a short story on the trial. It’s called “The Letter”. To an extent, this novel is sort of like a reverse engineering feat. After reading this book, if you now read “The Letter”, you get a different perspective on things. The effect I wanted to achieve was for “The Letter” and The House of Doors to mirror each other, reflecting back and forth, constantly changing.
OKB: Yes, I did wonder about that, reading the book. You have these historical characters, and like you just said, you reverse-engineered. I did get a sense of that.
TTE: It all comes to a point. Much is connected to “The Letter”, the short story. That’s why the trial had to be there.
OKB: Let me ask you now about your development as an author, and of authorship in itself. I was thinking of the titling of your books. They all have “of” in them. The X of Y, as it were.
TTE: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a superstitious thing, or maybe I read some study years ago, saying that titles that sell more always have the form “something” of “something”.
OKB: A Game of Thrones, for example?
TTE: Yeah. I like that rhythm. It has a certain heft to it.
OKB: The Garden of Evening Mists, The Gift of Rain… Those don’t have the suggestion of paradox The House of Doors does.
TTE: Yeah, it’s not The House with Doors.
OKB: The mention of it appears quite late in the book, and the reader continues for a while, wondering what the book title is suggesting.
TTE: Actually, it’s not my title. I wasn’t happy with my own title, and my editor suggested that I just call it The House of Doors. I hesitated because too many books are called The House of Something or other — of Spirits, of Fortune, et cetera.
OKB: I like the title. It’s conceptually challenging; what can it mean, The House of Doors? Apart from the similarity in titling, your books deal with recent history, with 20th-century history. Does that provide you with space to analyze humanity?
TTE: I don’t think so. It’s not like I think of a story, and set it 100 years ago, and then sit down and think of things to fill in. For this one, I knew that Somerset Maugham visited Malaya in 1920. Ok, that’s interesting. What was he doing there, how did he hear about the murder trial? That was the genesis of it all.
The setting, I suppose, allows for me to show hypocrisy as a constant in human life. Hypocrisy seems timeless; we will always be hypocrites. Too many people see Somerset Maugham as writing about adultery and murder. But he was actually pointing out the hypocrisy of the colonial ex-pat society in the Far East, and revealing not just the events, but also the reaction of the society around the event, and how hypocritical society actually was. He himself was a victim of hypocrisy as well. So really, what I sensed in my research was that he really hated hypocrisy. That was, to him, the greatest sin.
OKB: I would connect that to what you said earlier about jealousy. Hypocrisy and jealousy are cousins.
TTE: Yes. If a husband has a mistress on the side but then gets upset and violent when the wife finds a lover, that’s double standards right there.
OKB: I enjoy certain turns of phrase that you use. You manage to describe little things we all see all the time but which we never bother to perceive properly.
TTE: It’s actually very hard to capture such things.
Let me also say that this book is not about rich people. These are middle-class expats who populate the book, and there was such a population in Penang then. The book is definitely not about crazy-rich white people in Asia.
OKB: What I think this book is about is global people, people who cannot really belong anywhere anymore.
TTE: Well, Somerset Maugham was one of the first people to do so much traveling by modern means. He started with steamships and ended with jet planes. He lived into the late 90s.
OKB: My favourite takeaway from the book is the experience, the reminder, of the enormity of the Chinese revolution being felt at street level, as it were, yet far, far away from the heart of it.
TTE: So far away, so distant, and all these unknown people helping out, the tiny little cogs that actually made the whole enterprise a success. Yes. And also interesting is the fact that Penang had a role in this huge global cataclysmic event, one of the biggest of the 20th century. George Town, Armenian Street, all linked to China within this huge tapestry.
OKB: Lesley is not only caught in a gender war; she is caught between civilizations. She does not belong in England, she does not belong in South Africa, she does not belong in China. And in the end, she has to belong on an island called Penang…
TTE: …where everyone belongs, Penang being so open in essence.
I also didn’t realize what a feminist book this would turn out to be. What surprised me was how every woman in it shouted about the injustice of being a woman.
OKB: The women are sacrificing and the men’s great love is other men.
TTE: It’s all very sad. And the only way they can find happiness is to secretly break the rules and hope that they don’t get found out.
OKB: Your book is in some ways a snapshot of Penang as this between-place; Somerset Maugham reminds us of the powerful British empire; Sun Yat-Sen of the hope for a new China; and Lesley is in the middle. She is English but does not belong in England, she strongly feels the Chinese revolution but is not of it, and she prefers much more to live in Penang, and for good.
TTE: What irks me a lot is when Malaysian readers so vehemently want me to have an agenda, as if I should have a quota system to obey, based on race, on history, or what have you. They want a lot of irrelevant details put in, just to have them mentioned.
In any case, there’s an evolution with each book. I try to improve as a writer. My style changes because I have changed.
Now, I’m very conscious that I have to use language at a very high level. It’s like composing music. You have to create a mood for each scene. You have to pick the right words. There are so many things to do all at the same time. That’s why it can be so slow writing a book.
As I move on, I actually dread the coming books. It gets harder and harder.
OKB: Well, in any case, I look forward to book four. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Twan Eng. Gook luck.
Read earlier interviews with Twan Eng — “Letting Little Things Talk” and “A Chat With Tan Twan Eng”—as well as his article, “Festivals of Significance: A Writer’s View of Literary Festivals”.
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