The way Tan Twan Eng deftly weaves in some elements of Maugham's style so that it almost sounds like a pastiche and adds some elements from Maugham's books, some of the realia, is just extraordinary. Since I've started The Casuarina Tree, a collection of Maugham's short stories set mostly in Malaysia, which inspired The House of Doors, I appreciate Tan Twan Eng's talent even more. Not just talent. How much work, time and research must have gone into this novel and, at the same time, it seems so effortless, so understated, so smooth, so subtle. The House of Doors, longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, is lushly atmospheric. Tan, the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists, writes of whisky stengahs, gin pahits, and dhobis, syces, kebun (all words for servants). Landscapes are filled with screeching wild monkeys, fragrant frangipani flowers, and whispering casuarina trees, which later provide the title for Maugham's 1926 short story collection set in Malay. It feels wonderful, especially when my last book was published almost eleven years ago. The House of Doors was an extremely difficult book for me to write, and there were many occasions when I wanted to abandon it. Nothing would work, nothing was cohering. But I felt driven by the characters and the story, and I refused to give up on it. The House Of Doors is divided in two mingled points of view, Lesley Hamlyn written in 1st person and Somerset “Willie” Maugham written in 3rd person. The two characters intersect in 1921 in Straits Settlement of Penang. Lesley lives in Cassowary House together with his husband, Robert, a lawyer and her two sons. During his Asian trip, the famous Writer Somerset Maugham, a good friend of Robert’s, decides to visit the family for three weeks. He travels together with his secretary/lover, Gerald.

Because I was writing about Maugham writing his stories, I felt I had to follow his lead. But I found that restrictive and it just did not work for me. Eventually I abandoned that idea, and then the writing just opened up. As Willie prepares to leave and face his demons, Lesley throws caution to the wind, and confides how she came to know the charismatic Dr Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary fighting to overthrow the imperial dynasty of China. And more scandalous still, she reveals her connection to the case of an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction." SHAPIRO: But he solves those problems by kind of betraying the confidences of the people around him who trust him, and then he skewers them publicly in his stories.As a novel, however, it was less successful for me. The writing is functional and pared down, with occasional bursts of poetry. These tend to arrive at the end of chapters where the author has the strange habit of pausing scenes to have characters stare impassively at a patch of nature, contemplating eternity. For example: Maugham is a here a passive character; he is a vessel through which we get to listen to Lesley Hamlyn’s secrets from her past. The writer proves to be an excellent listener, which prompts the disillusioned Lesley to share confidences about events surrounding the visit of the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-sen to Penang and a famous murder. Both the murder and the visit were real events, although the former took place in 1911. The author puts them together to serve his plotting objectives, to positive results, I think.

We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge. The poor boy did look rather peaky last night.’ Robert peered over his spectacles at Willie. ‘And so do you, if you don’t mind me saying.’ hanging from the ceiling beams were more doors, carefully spaced apart and suspended on wires so thin they seemed to be floating in the air. We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge.” I am always excited about a book that's about real people, and Eng's newest is a book about W. Somerset Maugham. It helps that I'm already a fan of Maugham's work and have read four or five of his novels, I don't know what this would read like if you haven't read any of his work or know much about him; but I tell a lie, because the book isn't really about Maugham at all.

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Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription SHAPIRO: That must make it easier to write about events that happened more than a century ago. You don't have to worry about offending the people you're writing about. The world is so still, so quiescent, that I wonder if it has stopped turning. But then, high above the land, I see a tremor in the air. A pair of raptors, far from their mountain eyrie. For a minute or two I want to believe they are brahminy kites, but of course they cannot be”.