The Stranger's Child

Thomas Mallon

Hollinghurst's fine new book, The Stranger's Child—the closest thing he has written to an old-fashioned chronicle novel—contains a whole hidden literary curriculum, out of which he has fashioned something fresh and vital.
—The New York Times Book Review

Michael Dirda

Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child could hardly be better…Most novelists tend to be slightly show­offy, in one way or another; it's how they make clear that what they're doing is art. But Alan Hollinghurst doesn't need to be a prose Johnny Depp. Instead, he writes with the relaxed elegance and unobtrusive charm of a Cary Grant. Part social history, part social comedy and wholly absorbing, The Stranger's Child does everything a novel should do and makes it look easy.
—The Washington Post

Emma Brockes

Among the sometimes bloodless English male novelists of [Hollinghurst's] generation, he is the one whose cleverness is least in conflict with his ability to make the reader feel as well as see the story…As always, Mr. Hollinghurst maintains an almost perfect balance between momentum and still life. He is also shrewdly funny.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Hollinghurst, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty, published seven years ago, stakes his claim for Most Puckishly Bemused English Novelist with this rambunctious stepchild to the mannered satires of Henry Green, E.M. Forster, and especially Evelyn Waugh. Fancy young George Sawle returns from Cambridge in 1913 to his family estate of Two Acres in the company of the dashing poet Cecil Valance, secretly his lover. Cecil enjoys success and popularity wherever he goes, and George’s precocious sister, Daphne, falls under his spell. To her he gives a poem about Two Acres, a work whose reputation will outlive Cecil, for he is fated to perish in WWI. Hollinghurst then jumps ahead to Daphne’s marriage to Cecil’s brother Dudley and commences the series of generation-spanning indiscretions and revisionist biographies that complicate Cecil’s legacy: he is variously a rebel, a tedious war poet, and, possibly, the father of Daphne’s daughter. Time plays havoc with fashions, relationships, and sexual orientation; the joke is on the legions of memoirists, professors, and literary treasure hunters whose entanglements with eyewitnesses produce something too fickle and impermanent to be called legend. Hollinghurst’s novel, meanwhile, could hardly be called overserious, but nearly 100 years of bedroom comedy is a lot to keep up with, and the author struggles at times to maintain endless amusement over the course of the five installments that make up this book. But convolution is part of the point. A sweet tweaking of English literature’s foppish little cheeks by a distinctly 21st-century hand. Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. (Oct.)

Library Journal

On the eve of World War I, Cecil Valance, a wildly attractive and promising young poet, pays a visit to the home of his Cambridge boyfriend, the son of one of England's fine old families. He memorializes the visit with a poem that becomes famous after his wartime death. The poem, created as an autograph book keepsake for his lover's younger sister, Daphne, becomes the subject of speculation and debate for biographers and the generations that follow, as it contains hints about what might have happened during the visit and with whom. As the novel gallops ahead decade by decade, following the family fortunes of Daphne and her progeny, the events of that less tolerant era are viewed through an ever-cloudier lens. VERDICT With the prewar ambience of Atonement, the manor-house mystique of Gosford Park, and the palpable sexual tension of Hollinghurst's own The Line of Beauty, this generously paced, thoroughly satisfying novel will gladden the hearts of Anglophile readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]—Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Kirkus Reviews

Lives tangle and untangle in a literate, literary mystery at the heart of World War I by Man Booker Prize winner Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty, 2004, etc.). Cecil Valance is a poet of terrific talent who, according to a guest in a comfortably English countryside house, is "not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson." In his defense, he is still young. In the defense of everyone he meets, he is irresistible, a Lord Byron with sensitive appetites and a definite awareness of the effect he has on those he meets. George Sawle, scion of the modest manor, is awestruck. So is his sister, Daphne, who melts whenever Cess is around, even taking a puff on a cigar. But Cecil is the real deal as a poet of the Sassoon/Graves/Brooke school, as we learn on reading a heavily edited scrap of paper retrieved from a wastebasket: "Love as vital as the spring / And secret as -- XXX (something!)." War is looming, and Cecil, who professes to like hunting out in the fields, seems pleased at the prospect of trying his skills out on the Kaiser's boys. Alas, things don't work out as planned. Generations pass, and Cecil Valance's poems are firmly in the canon, especially a little one left as a commemoration to the Sawle family, with a carefully structured reference to kisses that might pass between the lips of lovers of any old gender. Now a biographer, working with the clues, is making the claim that Valance belongs in the canon not just of modernist British poetry, but of gay literature as well--a claim that, though seemingly well defended, stirs up controversy. Does it matter? Not to Cecil, poor fellow, "laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail." And perhaps not to those left behind, now gone themselves or very nearly so. But yes, it matters, and such is the stuff of biography. How do we know the truth about anyone's life? Hollinghurst's carefully written, philosophically charged novel invites us to consider that question.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the United States, World War I is something of a cipher, overshadowed by the conflagration that came after it. But in Britain, more than ninety years after the Armistice, it's still the war to end all wars. The biggest hit of 2010 on British television was Downton Abbey, an upstairs-downstairs drama whose subsequent season visits the trenches of the Somme. The National Theatre's play War Horse, set on the battlefields of France and Germany, has been a long-running hit in London. And the 2011 Mercury Prize, Britain's most prestigious music gong, went to PJ Harvey for Let England Shake, a brutal, uncompromising war album that visits the hell of Gallipoli, "an unearthly place" where "soldiers fall like lumps of meat."

And now comes The Stranger's Child, the first novel in seven years from Alan Hollinghurst, a century-spanning exploration of World War I's effect on British life and literature. "People can't get enough of the War," one character says late in the book, and even though we are in Thatcher's London there's no mistaking which capital-W war she means.

In particular The Stranger's Child looks at the tradition of war poetry, the verse of such soldier-writers as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Rupert Brooke, whom Americans know only glancingly but British schoolchildren still read, if no longer memorize, as early as primary school. The novel opens in 1913, when Cecil Valance—that's "SEH-sill" with a short E, though some of the novel's archer aristocrats say it as "sizzle"—spends the weekend at the house of George Sawle, his boyfriend up at Cambridge. Cecil is already making a name for himself as a poet; George's brother wants to know if he's met "young Rupert Brooke," whom his mother considers "an Adonis." After dinner he gives a reading: a bit of Tennyson and a bit of his own work, which seems to consist largely of descriptions of his own house, a Victorian pile on a 3,000-acre estate in Berkshire. One immodest line describes riding there "clear through a mile of glimmering park."

But before he leaves he inscribes George's sister's autograph book with a long poem about another house: the Sawles' own, much smaller home in Stanmore, then still rural and now part of the London commuter belt known as Metroland. The poem is called "Two Acres," and after Cecil is killed at Maricourt in 1916, it becomes a national touchstone. Over the next four sections of the novel, which are set in 1926, 1967, 1979–80 and 2008, we meet a dozen or more characters whose lives have been reshaped by Cecil's death and subsequent fame: George, who is not unhappily married (to a woman) but still remembers Cecil and "their mad sodomitical past"; his sister Daphne, who has married Cecil's brother Dudley and become Lady Valance in the process; Dudley himself, who despite being "a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of British Friends of Sherry" has always felt overshadowed; and a clutch of editors and biographers. But Cecil does not belong to them alone. Winston Churchill cites Valance in a war address. Evelyn Waugh mentions him in his letters. The fictional Valance is even included in Other Men's Flowers, the very real, millions-selling 1944 poetry collection found on nearly every British bookshelf.

Hollinghurst has a lot of fun reconstituting Cecil's poetry, though unlike A. S. Byatt, whose Possession featured entire pages of (fictional) verse, he only gives us a stanza or even a single line at a time. And he suggests that Valance is really not much of a poet at all. Into his customarily gorgeous phrases, the author inserts a clanger of Valance's, such as this sub Ogden Nash couplet: "I wonder if there's any man more / Learned than the man of Stanmore." Few others can write something that awful that well.

The Stranger's Child revisits some of Hollinghurst's enduring concerns: architecture and the social meaning of houses and buildings; the pastoral tradition and the relationship between city and country; and, most obviously, gay life and the construction of gay identity. (Not without cause: Wikipedia, which tolerates little in the way of sexual ambiguity, places Sassoon, Owen, and Brooke under "LGBT People from England.") In 1913, the very vocabulary of gay love is limited, with one minor character noting, not disapprovingly, that George is "very attached to [Cecil], in the Cambridge way." Cecil can only write about his love for George through indirection; "Two Acres" is disguised as an ode to Daphne, while George remembers "parts of it unpublished, unpublishable...secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes."

By the 1960s, Cecil's biographer Paul is in the closet, but he knows he isn't alone. Change is afoot. At a party he speaks hesitantly about "the Bill" that none of the guests can rise to call the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized gay sex in England in 1967. (Though the age of consent for gays remained twenty-one, five years higher than that for heterosexuals; it wasn't equalized until the Blair government amended the Act in 2000.) The vocabulary of gay desire is evolving, but indirection is still the watchword: perusing the personals in film pictorial mags, Paul alights on "Undisciplined bachelor (32) would like to meet strong-minded person with modern outlook." Nothing so indirect is required by the novel's last section. One character is described as "married," and the clarification that he's married to a man is not even necessary, while the rare-books dealer chasing Cecil's papers is arranging casual sex via text message with a trick whose name he can't remember.

Yet The Stranger's Child is ultimately less about gay history—and still less about gay desire; compared to The Swimming-Pool Library, the author's hothouse of a first novel, this new book is decidedly chaste—than about mythmaking, on both literary and national planes. In the 1920s section Dudley describes Cecil's obituary in the Times as "largely unrecognizable to anyone who'd really known my brother," and the misprisions go on for decades. Halfway through the novel the reader, who ingeniously has been let in on the truth about Cecil right at the start, may bridle as Hollinghurst's characters reinvent his life and poetry for their own purposes, destroying manuscripts or eliding letters with square brackets. But by the end of The Stranger's Child, such concerns seem overwrought. In a twenty-first century of endless war and instant celebrity, two horrors to which Britain has made a special contribution in recent years, Hollinghurst reminds us that the mess of real life can never be boiled down for public consumption and may not have any public meaning at all. Life is to live, "and the rest," as one character says, "is biography."

Jason Farago is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, n+1, Dissent, Frieze, and other publications. Trained as an art historian, he has contributed to several exhibition catalogs on art since 1960. He recently returned to his hometown of New York following a long sojourn in London.

Reviewer: Jason Farago