Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview #Ad The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng @canongatebooks

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The House of DoorsAbout the Book

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steey wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she sees him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

Format: eARC (320 pages)              Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 18th May 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I loved both of Tan Twan Eng’s previous books – The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists – but, boy, has he made us wait a long time for his next one. It’s been well worth the wait though because The House of Doors is absolutely brilliant. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up on the longlist for next year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Set in Penang (the author’s birthplace) and moving beween 1910 and 1921, it’s an intimate and nuanced portrait of the complications and consequences of relationships that must remain clandestine, such as that between Willie Somerset Maugham and Gerald Haxton, nominally his secretary but actually his lover.

The book opens in 1947 as Lesley Hamlyn, living on a remote farm in Doomfontein, South Africa, receives a package containing a copy of the book, The Casuarina Tree by W (Willie) Somerset Maugham. It evokes memories of the author’s two week stay in 1921 with her and her late husband, Robert, at Cassowary House, their former home in Penang. It was a place Lesley loved and was reluctant to leave but did so out of a mixture of loyalty to her husband, and despair. The book also has another significance for Lesley, one which the reader will only discover in the moving final chapter of the book.

Willie arrives in Penang in 1921 weakened by sickness from his travels through the Far East and beset by money troubles, a situation he fears may scupper his relationship with Gerald who has become used to a luxury lifestyle. In order to restore his finances, he needs to find material for his next book. Willie and Lesley form an immediate bond, both being in marriages that provide a form of cover from society gossip and speculation.  Lesley begins to unburden herself to Willie, sharing details of a secret relationship that took place ten years earlier as well as her involvement with charismatic Chinese revolutionary, Sen Yat-Sen (a real life figure).  She also reveals her connection with a (real life) murder case that scandalised the British inhabitants of the Straits Settlement and the Federated Malay States.

Willie uses her recollections as material for the stories in The Casuarina Tree. Reading the published book, and in particular the story ‘The Letter’, Lesley observes that ‘He had woven it into something that was familiar to me, yet also uncanny; factual, but at the same time completely fictional.’  Tan Twan Eng has harnessed the same writer’s instinct to blend historical fact with fiction in order to create this wonderful novel.

Those who have read Tan Twan Eng’s previous novels won’t be surprised that there is wonderful descriptive writing that really brings to life the bustling streets of the ‘real’ Penang, i.e. the Penang that the white residents don’t see. There is also a wonderful scene in which Willie and Lesley go for an evening swim. ‘That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.’ Gorgeous.

The House of Doors of the title is an actual place in the novel but is also a metaphor for things that must remain hidden, often things more wonderful than the plain facade shown to the outside world.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Assured, intimate, moving

Try something similar: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry

Tan Twan EngAbout the Author

Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The House of Doors is his third novel. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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#BookReview Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

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Elizabeth FinchAbout the Book

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration.

Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth’s astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present.

But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil’s view of the world forever.

Format: Paperback (192 pages)              Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 23rd February 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

This was a book club pick and I’ll be honest, based on the lukewarm reviews, it’s one I probably wouldn’t have prioritised to read despite the fact I enjoyed the author’s earlier book, The Sense of an Ending.

The first part of the book introduces us to the rather intimidating, intellectually rigorous Elizabeth Finch. As she states to her students, ‘I am not employed to help you… I am here to assist you to think and argue and develop minds of your own’.  Her credo can perhaps be summed up as ‘question everything’. Her heroes, if she would ever have such a thing, are those willing to challenge established beliefs.  ‘Apostates are the representatives of doubt, and doubt – vivid doubt – is the sign of an active intelligence.’

Intellectually, Neil is in awe of Elizabeth and he retains his admiration for her even after she is no longer his teacher. They start to meet regularly for lunch, always arranged with Elizabeth’s trademark precision. He is eager to please her and rejoices when their discussions over lunch leave him feeling cleverer: ‘I knew more, I was more cogent’.

The book’s second section consists of a lengthy essay on the life of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome. Is the choice of subject matter, I wondered, evidence of the author’s own interest in this historical figure, a mere coincidence that they share a first name or something intended to have more significance? Written by Neil, the essay is based on Elizabeth’s notebooks and other papers which he has inherited following her death. In doing so, he believes he’s carrying out her wishes, that gifting him her library and a reading list was ‘the clearest of signals’.  It’s also perhaps his way of demonstrating that, having drifted from job to job and had a number of failed relationships, he is not after all ‘King of the Unfinished Projects’ as he has been dubbed by one of his daughters. However, in constructing the essay based on Elizabeth’s notes, does Neil end up writing a simulacrum rather than something original based on his own ideas and sources. Surely even Elizabeth’s ideas should be questioned?

Neil remains curious, almost obsessively so, about Elizabeth’s life. Although referencing lines from one of C. P. Cavafy’s poems – ‘From what I did and what I said, Let them not seek to find who I was’ – in fact that’s effectively what Neil sets out to do.  He questions Elizabeth’s brother, Christopher, about her childhood and her relationship with their parents, whilst at the same time persisting in declaring he is not writing her biography. Anna, one of his former classmates, has her own theory about the reasons for his curiosity. Tantalisingly, Neil never gets to the bottom of several mysteries about Elizabeth’s life but very likely she would have hated it if he’d done so. And perhaps we can never really know another person.

Elizabeth Finch is a novel of ideas rather than plot but the more I reflected on it the more I appreciated its subtleties.

In three words: Thoughtful, nuanced, philosophical

JulianBarnesAbout the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.

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