The Stranger’s Childby Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £20)
Do not be put off by the first section of this novel. As you read it, you may feel trapped in over-familiar pre-first world war territory, a spacious English garden filled with drifting whiffs of The Shooting Party, The Go-Between, Guy and Pauline and Howards End. You may also feel that you’ve read enough before about chaps with fly buttons giving each other meaningful looks; and that you can do without a sentimental portrait of a character who is clearly a conscienceless bisexual philanderer whose much-vaunted poetry is no more than second-rate neo-Georgian. It is a relief—if no surprise—when you find, almost casually, that he has died on the Somme in 1916.
But this is what you are being manoeuvred into feeling, for Alan Hollinghurst is a master of the unobtrusively prepared effect. Your reservations and resistance are played back to you as more and yet more is revealed, without melodrama but in the piecemeal, back-to-front way that we often find things out in real life. The optic in the first section is alternatively that of either George Sawle, who has been befriended up at Cambridge and inducted into the Apostles semi-secret league by the handsome young aristocratic poet Cecil Valance, or that of Daphne, George’s younger sister, who falls in love with Valance too. Neither narrator is, of course, reliable. As the book’s five sections gradually unfold, taking in most of the next 100 years, all the narrators prove slightly unreliable, because they each have a viewpoint from which not everything is visible, but also because each has knowledge he or she suppresses, either about Cecil or about themselves.
The book slowly develops into a compulsive magical mystery tour. With each new section we are plunged into a fresh setting, as if into a different novel with its own cast of characters. Pages go past before we realise that the middle-aged woman we are seeing through the eyes of a bank clerk is the little girl we last met in a country house in the 1920s—or indeed that the boys’ prep school of the 1960s is this same house transformed. It is like being at a birthday party, a reunion or a memorial service (all of which figure in the novel) where one suddenly understands that the bald, eminent professor used to be silly young Whatsit, or that the vague old lady once slept with him. Or, more often, that the vague old man did. As in all Hollinghurst’s novels, gay characters abound, to a point that many readers will feel to be improbable. Even when the men marry, their wives tend to be presented as slightly formidable comfort-blankets rather than as fully realised people.
This is a novel on many themes: the role of the biographer, the pursuit of lost letters, poems or witnesses, the unreliability of both memoirs and memory, the great social changes wrought by the 20th century and—inevitably—loss, decay, decline both social and personal, and the fading away of once-bright names into obscurity and then oblivion. Once-scandalous books end up “almost unsaleable” in a charity shop. A woman who has managed to run a great house and cope skilfully with a clever but awful husband, dies in a dilapidated bungalow with a chronically ineffectual son. Such is life, we know that really—but most poignantly, in this book, this perennial truth is embodied in the two very English houses that frame its action: the Lutyens-style home in blooming “Middlesex country” which provides the setting for Cecil’s most anthologised poem, and the Valance family’s own far grander house with “jelly-mould domes” on its dining room ceiling that enchant the juvenile Daphne.
Inexorably, the Lutyens house is swallowed up by Stanmore and Pinner; “executive homes” devour the two-acre garden. But a more significant fate is depicted for the Valance house which, by the 1920s, has become “a Victorian monstrosity” fit only for an extensive makeover, with false ceilings, by a Syrie Maugham-style designer. (An Eric Ravilious figure also appears.) In 1940 the house is requisitioned by the army, and in 1946 the owner sells it off as a school and goes to live abroad. We are in Brideshead Revisited country here: the house even has its own chapel. As the Valances are not Catholic, I don’t find that entirely convincing, but as an example of the operations of time and chance, the building works wonderfully throughout the book. Victoriana becomes fashionable again and the vandalised house is the inspiration on which an assistant master (another attractive second-rater like the long-dead Cecil) launches a television career. What will happen to Cecil’s marble tomb effigy in the unwritten future is anyone’s guess.
Do not be put off by the first section of this novel. As you read it, you may feel trapped in over-familiar pre-first world war territory, a spacious English garden filled with drifting whiffs of The Shooting Party, The Go-Between, Guy and Pauline and Howards End. You may also feel that you’ve read enough before about chaps with fly buttons giving each other meaningful looks; and that you can do without a sentimental portrait of a character who is clearly a conscienceless bisexual philanderer whose much-vaunted poetry is no more than second-rate neo-Georgian. It is a relief—if no surprise—when you find, almost casually, that he has died on the Somme in 1916.
But this is what you are being manoeuvred into feeling, for Alan Hollinghurst is a master of the unobtrusively prepared effect. Your reservations and resistance are played back to you as more and yet more is revealed, without melodrama but in the piecemeal, back-to-front way that we often find things out in real life. The optic in the first section is alternatively that of either George Sawle, who has been befriended up at Cambridge and inducted into the Apostles semi-secret league by the handsome young aristocratic poet Cecil Valance, or that of Daphne, George’s younger sister, who falls in love with Valance too. Neither narrator is, of course, reliable. As the book’s five sections gradually unfold, taking in most of the next 100 years, all the narrators prove slightly unreliable, because they each have a viewpoint from which not everything is visible, but also because each has knowledge he or she suppresses, either about Cecil or about themselves.
The book slowly develops into a compulsive magical mystery tour. With each new section we are plunged into a fresh setting, as if into a different novel with its own cast of characters. Pages go past before we realise that the middle-aged woman we are seeing through the eyes of a bank clerk is the little girl we last met in a country house in the 1920s—or indeed that the boys’ prep school of the 1960s is this same house transformed. It is like being at a birthday party, a reunion or a memorial service (all of which figure in the novel) where one suddenly understands that the bald, eminent professor used to be silly young Whatsit, or that the vague old lady once slept with him. Or, more often, that the vague old man did. As in all Hollinghurst’s novels, gay characters abound, to a point that many readers will feel to be improbable. Even when the men marry, their wives tend to be presented as slightly formidable comfort-blankets rather than as fully realised people.
This is a novel on many themes: the role of the biographer, the pursuit of lost letters, poems or witnesses, the unreliability of both memoirs and memory, the great social changes wrought by the 20th century and—inevitably—loss, decay, decline both social and personal, and the fading away of once-bright names into obscurity and then oblivion. Once-scandalous books end up “almost unsaleable” in a charity shop. A woman who has managed to run a great house and cope skilfully with a clever but awful husband, dies in a dilapidated bungalow with a chronically ineffectual son. Such is life, we know that really—but most poignantly, in this book, this perennial truth is embodied in the two very English houses that frame its action: the Lutyens-style home in blooming “Middlesex country” which provides the setting for Cecil’s most anthologised poem, and the Valance family’s own far grander house with “jelly-mould domes” on its dining room ceiling that enchant the juvenile Daphne.
Inexorably, the Lutyens house is swallowed up by Stanmore and Pinner; “executive homes” devour the two-acre garden. But a more significant fate is depicted for the Valance house which, by the 1920s, has become “a Victorian monstrosity” fit only for an extensive makeover, with false ceilings, by a Syrie Maugham-style designer. (An Eric Ravilious figure also appears.) In 1940 the house is requisitioned by the army, and in 1946 the owner sells it off as a school and goes to live abroad. We are in Brideshead Revisited country here: the house even has its own chapel. As the Valances are not Catholic, I don’t find that entirely convincing, but as an example of the operations of time and chance, the building works wonderfully throughout the book. Victoriana becomes fashionable again and the vandalised house is the inspiration on which an assistant master (another attractive second-rater like the long-dead Cecil) launches a television career. What will happen to Cecil’s marble tomb effigy in the unwritten future is anyone’s guess.
