In 1911, Ethel Proudlock, a married British woman living in Kuala Lumpur (then in British Malaya), shot dead a local manager called William Steward in the grounds of her bungalow. Proudlock claimed that Steward had tried to rape her; yet she was found guilty of his murder, and sentenced to hang. Her life was only saved by a pardon from the regional sultan five months later.
The “Proudlock case” became an expatriate society scandal and an unedifying exposé of colonial tensions in the area. It was rumoured that Proudlock, home alone in a low-necked tea gown on the night of the killing, had been having an affair with Steward, and – though likely mixed-race herself – killed him after discovering he was seeing a Chinese woman too. Another novelist might have turned this sorry tale into a pacy courtroom thriller. But in his third novel, The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng crafts it as an elegant meditation on oppression, repression and loneliness.
Tan’s story, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, is predominantly set in 1921, during the short period spent by the peripatetic writer Somerset Maugham and his fabulously feckless younger lover Gerald in the state of Penang. A “traveller sitting in the half shadows”, always scavenging for source material, Somerset Maugham would in 1926 turn the Proudlock case into his most well-known short story, The Letter, and later a play as well. The topic suited the most piercing chronicler of the private desires concealed behind the breakfast newspapers of English colonial society.
This is, indeed, a novel of many doors – perhaps a couple too many. The title refers to the literal kind: the ancient Chinese doors collected by the revolutionary Chinese lover of Lesley Hamlyn, Somerset Maugham’s fictional English host, and stored in the house in downtown Penang in which the couple meet.
Alternatively, think of them as mirrors, for one of the joys of this capacious portrait of British Malaya is how the many narratives folded inside it reflect and refract each other. Lesley’s marriage to Robert, a lawyer who’s closeted, is as much a miserable sham as Somerset Maugham’s is to his wife in London – and in turn that of the Proudlocks.
