Tan Twan Eng – She Reads Novels

I loved Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists but his latest novel, The House of Doors, sounded less appealing and I only decided to read it when I saw it had been longlisted (and then shortlisted) for this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Now that I’ve read it, I have mixed feelings about it; there was a lot to like and admire, but it definitely didn’t captivate me the way The Garden of Evening Mists did.

The House of Doors weaves the fictional story of Lesley and Robert Hamlyn around a real life visit in 1921 by the author William Somerset Maugham to Penang, Malaysia – or Malaya, as it was still known at the time. Lesley has spent her whole life in Malaya, while her husband Robert was born in Britain and moved to Penang as an adult. Maugham, referred to as Willie throughout the novel, is an old friend of Robert’s and has come to stay with them at their home, Cassowary House. Leaving his wife behind in England, he is accompanied by Gerald, his lover and secretary.

At first Lesley is not very happy about having visitors and it takes her a while to warm to Willie, but she eventually finds herself confiding in him and sharing with him stories about her past. She tells him about her involvement with Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary who came to Penang to raise funds, and about her friend, Ethel Proudlock, who was charged with the murder of a man. Some of the things Willie hears and experiences during his time with the Hamlyns will later find their way into his fiction.

The book is beautifully written, which I had expected from my previous experience of Tan’s work, and the descriptions of Penang itself are particularly lovely and evocative. I can only think of one or two other novels I’ve read set in Malaysia, but it’s a setting I love and I enjoyed revisiting it through Tan’s descriptive writing. The book deals almost entirely with British characters and we learn a lot about the colonial lifestyles and attitudes of the time, but although Tan Twan Eng himself is a Malaysian author, if you’re hoping for a Malaysian perspective you won’t really find that here. Through the Sun Yat Sen storyline, we are given a little bit of insight into Chinese revolutionary politics, but again we see this from Lesley’s point of view, through her interactions with Sun Yat Sen and his associates.

The plot moves quite slowly, maybe because so much of the story is told in the form of flashbacks. At times I was bored, but one part of the book that I did find gripping was the Ethel Proudlock storyline. It’s based on a real murder case which I knew nothing about before reading this novel, so I had no idea what the outcome was going to be. Maugham used the case as the inspiration for his 1927 play The Letter, which was made into a film starring Bette Davis. There are references to other Maugham stories, novels and plays throughout the book as well, but they meant very little to me because I haven’t read any of his work apart from The Painted Veil. I think if I’d had more familiarity with Maugham’s writing it’s possible that I would have been able to get more out of this book. I had similar experiences with Colm Tóibín’s The Magician and Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, novels about Thomas Mann and E.M. Forster respectively (I haven’t read much of their work either and was left with the feeling that I’d missed something).

The House of Doors wasn’t a huge success with me, then, but the setting and the beautiful writing made it worth reading. The Walter Scott Prize winner is due to be announced later this week and of the shortlisted titles I’ve read so far, My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is still my favourite with this one second above Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts. Maybe the winner will be one of the three I still haven’t read!

Book 21/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Garden of Evening Mists is set in Malaya and is narrated by Teoh Yun Ling, a Straits Chinese woman who, at the beginning of the novel, has retired after a long and successful career as a Supreme Court Judge in Kuala Lumpur. Returning to the Cameron Highlands area of the Malayan Peninsula – a very special place for Yun Ling, being the site of both the garden of Yugiri (‘evening mists’) and her friends’ tea plantation, Majuba – she makes the decision to write her memoirs, even if that means remembering things she would rather forget.

In a series of flashbacks, we go back with Yun Ling to the 1950s, during a time of conflict known as the Malayan Emergency. This is when she first comes to Yugiri and meets its creator, Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener to the Japanese emperor. Yun Ling hopes Aritomo will design a garden in memory of her sister but he refuses, offering instead to take her on as an apprentice so that she can learn how to do it herself. At first, she finds it difficult to be near Aritomo (she and her sister, Yun Hong, were both imprisoned in a Japanese camp during World War II) but as they work together in the garden Yun Ling slowly begins to come to terms with the traumas of her past.

This is the second novel by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng and enjoyed a lot of success following its publication in 2012 – the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won both the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Having now read it, I agree that it’s an excellent book and deserved its success. Until recently, I had very little knowledge of Malaya (or Malaysia as we now know it). Now I have read two books in two months (The Separation by Dinah Jefferies was the first) and I’m finding it a very interesting country to read about. The Garden of Evening Mists covers three different periods in the country’s history: the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s, the Emergency of the 1950s, and the more recent past, probably the 1980s, in which Malaysia is an independent country.

We wait a long time to hear what exactly happened to Yun Ling and Yun Hong in the Japanese camp, but we do find out eventually – although certain details continue to be withheld or only hinted at. It’s understandable as this is Yun Ling’s own story to tell and she can choose what to say and not to say; some memories may be too painful or uncomfortable to bring to the surface. It was the wartime sections of the book that I found the most gripping and emotional, however. I was particularly moved by the story told by Tatsuji, a Japanese art collector who visits Yun Ling in the present day, about Japan’s kamikaze pilots.

This is not just a book about war and suffering, though. Gardening, as you might have guessed from the title, also plays a big part in the story. Gardens are usually peaceful places to sit or to walk – and reading about gardens feels peaceful too. I don’t have a lot of interest in gardening myself but I was fascinated by the descriptions of Yugiri and the techniques used by Aritomo to create illusions of depth and distance. He puts so much thought into where to place every rock, every stone. As well as gardening, Aritomo is also a master of other art forms including woodcuts (ukiyo-e) and tattooing (horimono), and these were interesting to read about too. Other aspects of Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian culture are also covered in the novel, such as storytelling and mythology. But most of all, this is a book about memory: memory and the act of forgiving and forgetting.

There are so many ideas and themes packed into this wonderful novel and I’ve only managed to discuss a few of them here. I haven’t even mentioned how beautifully written it is and how cleverly it is structured. As I read, I wanted to go back and read earlier passages again because things were taking on more and more meaning as more layers were revealed. It’s that sort of book.

I read The Garden of Evening Mists as part of A More Diverse Universe hosted by Aarti of BookLust. The event doesn’t end until Saturday 27th September so there’s still time for you to join in.