A review by jayisreading
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

mysterious reflective slow-paced

3.0

The House of Doors was a bit of a difficult read for me, not so much due to its content and narrative, but rather because of its pacing. Eng takes an inordinate amount of time to let the story unfold, which is further intensified by the fact that he is also very slow to reveal the complexity of his characters. For me, at least, it wasn’t until the halfway mark—perhaps even later—that I actually started taking interest in what was happening, which, at that point, is far later than I’d like. Curiosity got the better of me, though, and I found myself pushing through to the end rather than dropping it.

I can tell Eng dedicated a lot of time into doing research for this novel, which is primarily set in Malaysia during the 1920s, as well as featuring an actual English author, W. Somerset Maugham. Furthermore, there were a lot of threads to grasp that dealt with complex topics ranging from colonial life in Penang, the “sanctity” of marriage, to political unrest in China. On a somewhat related note, I thought it was a really interesting decision on Eng’s part to write from the perspective of colonizers—wealthy ones, at that—in such a way that it actually left me feeling very uneasy throughout the novel. I want to say this was deliberate though, considering his exploration of the subjectivity of “good morals” through these characters, even though it was done in an agonizingly slow manner.

A bit unfortunately, this novel didn’t entirely work for me due to the slow pacing. However, I think I wasn’t in the best headspace to read such an intricately layered novel, otherwise I think I would have better appreciated what Eng was trying to do.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings