Mention the writer W. Somerset Maugham and the name might evoke a fond recollection of his most popular novels, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor's Edge. Maugham's critical self-assessment — possibly apocryphal — may also come up. The story goes that he placed his work "in the very first row of the second tier."
In fact, Maugham (1874-1965), who plays a central role in Tan Twan Eng's entrancing new novel, The House of Doors, is an inspired choice for a character. Tan's narrative, set largely in 1921 in Penang, in the Federated Malay States, reimagines Willie Maugham's two-week stay with his "secretary" and longtime clandestine lover, Gerald Haxton, at the stately waterfront home of an old friend from London, the lawyer Robert Hamlyn, and his wife, Lesley.
