Interview with Tan Twan Eng, author of The House of Door
Congratulations on your remarkable achievements, including being an international bestseller and receiving three nominations for the Booker Prize!
As an inspiration and trailblazer for Malaysian and Southeast Asian authors, what message or themes do you hope to convey through your writing, particularly in the context of representing your cultural background on the global literary stage?
Thank you. I leave the interpretation of my books to the readers. For me, there’s nothing worse than hitting readers’ heads with a trendy ‘message’ or ‘theme’. Whenever I start reading a novel and there’s an overt and unsubtle agenda by the author, I drop the book and choose another one to read. I place emphasis on the use of language and the strength of the story and the characters. These are the factors which, I feel, will make a book endure, books that won’t be outdated in five, even three years’ time.
In previous interviews, you mentioned that The House of Doors was a particularly challenging book to write and that it took a long time.
What made this writing process uniquely difficult, and how did it differ from your experiences with your other works, such as The Garden of Evening Mists? Were there specific elements of the narrative or characters that posed unexpected challenges?
People tell me that every novel becomes easier to write, but that’s not true at all. Each novel comes with its own set of obstacles and challenges.
There are four real-life characters in The House of Doors. To portray them accurately required extensive research. Once I knew enough about them I thought it’d be easy to re-create them on the page. To my dismay I found it constricting to write about them, as I had to adapt the directions of my plot to their personalities and characteristics. It was much easier to write the fictional characters I had created, because I had total freedom there.
My novel takes place mainly within two time frames, and the story is narrated from two alternating points of view – first person in the voice of Lesley Hamlyn, and third person from the viewpoint of Somerset Maugham. For a long time I couldn’t make the structure work. But in the end, with the help of my editor Francis Bickmore, I managed to make all the chapters and scenes and characters cohere smoothly.
The House of Doors is based on true events, specifically a Malaysian murder case in 1911. What about this historical incident intrigued you, and how did you navigate the process of weaving a fictional narrative around real events?
The first Maugham story I ever read was The Letter. I subsequently found out he had based it on the Proudlock Trial. I was intrigued by the fact that it had taken place in Kuala Lumpur, and I wondered how he came to hear about it. Ethel Proudlock was the first white woman in Malaya to be charged with murder. Her case was a cause celebre: the English felt her behaviour had ‘let down the side’; but it also exposed to the local people that the English were not the morally superior people they claimed to be. In some ways the trial helped to weaken their rule in Malaya.
I wanted to bring out the immediacy of her trial, to make it come alive. For that I needed to find the original trial transcripts. It was quite a task locating them. I finally found them in the National Archives in Singapore. But court reporting a century ago was rather spotty and there were many gaps in the transcripts. I was grateful for my training as a lawyer in analysing and comprehending them.
Your novel predominantly explores the perspectives of the British residents in Penang during colonial times. What insights do you hope for readers to gain by looking at the world through this particular lens, particularly in the exploration of power dynamics and cultural clashes?
Again, it’s really up to them what they read into my books. I have no wish to impose any views on anyone. More than anything else, at its heart The House of Doors is about the act of literary creation: how do stories get passed from one person to another, from one place to another, and even across time. How do writers transform fact into fiction?
Reflecting on your writing journey, what unexpected challenges have you encountered, and how have you overcome them? Conversely, have there been breakthrough moments or highlights that significantly shaped your approach to storytelling?
The challenge, right from the beginning, has always been to improve and grow as a writer with every book I write. That’s one of the reasons why it’s taken so long to write The House of Doors. Every book gets harder and harder to write. The quality of the writing has to be better than my previous books, more refined, otherwise what would be the point?
Fun questions / speed round:
1. Favorite Malaysian food? Too many, but if forced to choose: beef rendang.
2. Favorite book of 2023? The House of Doors of course (haha!). Seriously though, Papyprus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Irene Vallejo.
3. Book you’re most looking forward to reading in 2024? Long Island, the new novel Colm Toibin, the sequel to Brooklyn.
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang but lived in various places in Malaysia as a child. He studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur’s most reputable law firms. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was longlisted for the Man Booker in 2007. His second, The Garden of Evening Mists was a major international bestseller, shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2012 and winner of the Man Asia Literary Prize 2012 and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. It was adapted into an award-winning film in 2019 that was directed by Tom Lin. Twan divides his time between Malaysia and South Africa.
