Shortlist interview: Tan Twan Eng

11th June, 2024

Shortlisted author and previous Scott Prize winner Tan Twan Eng tells us more about The House of Doors.

How do you feel about being shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction?  Do you consider yourself an historical novelist?

It’s heart-warming, but it’s also tense and exciting! It’s an immense honour: the prize is unique – I can’t think of any other prize that celebrates historical fiction written in English from around the world.

Whether I see myself as a historical novelist would depend on the book I’m writing:  with The House of Doors I felt that many of the things I was describing were still (and regrettably) urgent and relevant today.

However, my aim, always, is to write books that are not trendy or timely, but timeless.

How did the people and times you write about in this novel first lodge in your imagination?

My father often spoke about how his childhood home in Armenian Street in Penang was just a few doors away from Dr Sun Yat Sen’s political base in South East Asia. That little bit of trivia stuck in my head: it felt strange to me that Dr Sun, whose revolutionary actions helped topple the Chinese monarchy, had planned and organised all of it from that little house in that little street over a hundred years ago.

My father died in 2013, and I’m grateful that I could pay tribute to him in my book, via this small fragment he had told me, once upon a long ago.

I was also intrigued by how Somerset Maugham came to write one of his most famous stories. During his travels around Malaya he was told about the 1911 real-life murder trial of Mrs Ethel Proudlock, the wife of an assistant school-master in Kuala Lumpur.  He rewrote that as ‘The Letter’.  When it was published the story angered a lot of the locals.

Compared to my previous novels, The House of Doors is a quieter, more interior novel – I wanted the surface to be restrained, deceptively placid. As we all know, quiet writing is harder than flashy, noisy writing.

The House of Doors is also infused with many elements from Maugham’s works. I think of The House of Doors and The Letter as a pair of mirrors, reflecting each other. Reading The House of Doors will affect your reading of The Letter; this will then alter how you regard the former work, which in turn will recast the way you view the latter short story. And on and on it’ll go. The slightest tilt in the angle of one mirror will make you question your perception of each work, back and forth, back and forth, until you are unable to distinguish between what is real, and what is fiction.

At its heart, The House of Doors is about the act of creation: how stories are made, and how they are passed from person to person, from one place to another, and even across time. How do writers turn fact into fiction? And how do they transform fiction into fact?

What place does research have in your writing?  When does the fiction take over from the facts?

I used to be a lawyer, so facts and research are highly important for me. The process of writing a novel, for me, is racked with doubts and second-guessing, so facts and research give me a stronger sense of confidence, a more solid foundation, when I write.

Fiction takes over when I put myself into the personalities and thoughts and emotions of my characters.   In the end I must tell myself that I’m not writing history, but stories. I’m writing about characters with all their frustrations, hopes, dreams, fears, hates and loves.

‘All novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,’ the poet Novalis wrote.   It’s in the gaps and silences of history where I’ve fictionalised the events.

Can writing about the past help us to deal with the present and think about the future?

Undoubtedly. The world has changed, but we as human beings haven’t changed much, have we? We’re still shackled by so many of the same timeless issues: injustice, prejudice, selfishness. We still have cruelty and wars. And, sadly, I think we will always have these problems.

The Walter Scott Prize has a younger sibling, the Young Walter Scott Prize, which is a creative writing prize for young people (11-19 years), who are asked to write a short story set before they were born. If you were asked for one tip to help young writers start writing historical fiction, what would it be?

You have to be curious. You must feel the compelling urge to know ‘Why? Why did it happen? Why did they do it?’