House Of Doors (5*)

If you're nostalgic for colonialism, author Tan Twan Eng can satisfy that politically incorrect craving with his latest novel, although fully appreciating his meticulous descriptions of British expatriate life will likely require frequent dictionary consultation for anyone who grew up outside of Malaysia.

In the garden below the kebun was resting in the shade of the casuarina tree, puffing on a kretek and scratching his groin through the folds of his shorts with an abstracted, canine pleasure. Looking at him, a longing for the man’s simple life gripped Willie.

Envious of a native fiddling with his balls under a tree, he thought. How the mighty have fallen.

Willie is none other than W. Somerset Maugham whose work and biography are major sources of inspiration for this ingeniously constructed book that skillfully anchors the not-too-distant past in the early 20th-century present.  Peripherally,  The House of Doors is also a historical novel about the rise of Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary revered in both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan.

Robert, Maugham's former (fictional) roommate and Lesley his much younger wife, host the peripatetic writer and his male secretary at their home in Penang, after she has discovered the rather obvious reason behind the sexlessness of her marriage.

And I relished the nights when he slipped into my bed. He was a considerate lover, and he never outstayed his welcome . . . Robert’s nocturnal visits to my bedroom tapered off and eventually ceased completely. I missed him in my bed, but I had a handsome and loving husband and two beautiful sons, and we lived in a house by the sea. What more could I ask for?

Lesley soon finds out in a steamy scene that recalls Sigourney Weaver's passion for Mel Gibson in Peter Weir's sensational political thriller of 1982, In the Year of Living Dangerously.

Despite her understandable homophobia and her awareness of Maugham's professional reputation for spilling the tea--sometimes without even changing people's names--Lesley takes an enormous risk:  she weaponizes her marital disappointment and her close personal link to the 1919 revolution in China by sharing details about both with her houseguest in the context of her friendship with an actual woman in nearby Kuala Lampur on trial for shooting her husband.  The latter tale becomes the basis for The Letter, a 1927 play by Maugham and one of author's biggest successes, especially after it became a Hollywood hit for Bette Davis.

Surprisingly, Maugham keeps Lesley's secret, perhaps because of the bond they form during some midnight skinny dipping that reduces her homophobia and his defenses in an otherworldly encounter that practically demands to be filmed.  It's a good thing, too. Despite their infidelities, Lesley has remained married to Robert (not a spoiler), content in old age if not entirely happy:

What sustained a marriage, kept it going year upon year, I realised, were the things we left unmentioned, the truths that we longed to speak forced back down our throats, back into the deepest, darkest chambers of our hearts.

And then, in the book's truly romantic masterstroke, Tan rewards the long suffering Lesley with a gift of true love, unlocked by her knowledge of the colophon that marks each of Maugham's books:  a hamsa, a Middle Eastern symbol to keep evil at bay.  

I was completely unaware of the symbol before a visit last month to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.  "What is this?" I asked a gift-shop employee before purchasing a hamsa on a t-shirt.  Now that's what I call evidence of literary woo woo!