WHEN I MENTIONED ON Twitter that I was reading Tan Twan Eng’s third novel, writer Richard Osman commented that “The House of Doors is the exact title I’d use if I had to invent an imaginary Booker Prize-winning novel in a book”. Cynicism aside, he’s spot on: Tan’s first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his second was shortlisted. The House of Doors is unquestionably good enough to complete the trajectory.
It is also the latest in a curious sub-genre: that of the biographical novel about a gay (or gay-adjacent) writer, following Colm Tóibín’s brilliant The Master (Henry James) and The Magician (Thomas Mann), Janette Jenkins’s wrongly overlooked Firefly (Noël Coward) and Damon Galgut’s rightly overlooked Arctic Summer (E.M. Forster).
is Somerset Maugham, or Willie as he’s known in the book. Most of the story takes place in 1921, when he and his secretary-with-benefits Gerald Haxton are staying with Lesley and Robert Hamlyn, old friends of Willie’s in the (1919) and (1925) bookend the period.
