The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [242]
The introduction, questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel—his follow-up to 2004’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty.
Introduction
“Brilliantly realized … Beautifully written, ambitious in its scope and structure, confident in its execution, TheStranger’s Child is a master class in the art of the novel.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
Alan Hollinghurst’s stunning new novel is difficult to categorize. It is at once a comedy of manners, a century-spanning epic, a literary mystery, and the story of the short life and long posthumous reputation of a promising young poet, Cecil Valance. It is also an adroit investigation into the limits of human knowing, the fallibility of memory, and the way history is made.
Set in five episodes that take place in 1913, 1926, 1967, 1977, and 2008, the novel begins when the handsome, aristocratic Cecil visits the home of his Cambridge friend and lover George Sawle. During his brief stay, Cecil drinks heavily, trashes his room, loudly proclaims his paganism, recites Tennyson and his own poetry, ravishes George in the woods, makes a clumsy pass at George’s sister, Daphne, who falls in love with him, and writes what will become his most famous poem, “Two Acres.” A love poem and an ode to rural England, it appears to be written for Daphne—but in fact was originally inspired by George. The rest of the novel elaborates the seeds planted in this opening pastoral scene, full of prewar serenity, sexual secrecy, and Cecil’s uncanny ability to enchant and beguile, an ability that would long outlast his short life. That idyllic Edwardian world is soon utterly shattered by war. Cecil is killed in the trenches of World War I, Daphne marries his brother, Dudley, and becomes mistress of Corley Court, and George suppresses his true sexual orientation in a staid, childless marriage. Cecil’s death at age twenty-five only heightens interest in his life and inflates the value of his poetry. Churchill reads his poem to a war-weary nation, and the mythologizing of both poem and poet is already well under way when Sebastian Stokes writes his soft-focus memoir about Cecil. The potential scandal of Cecil’s sexuality is kept carefully hidden, and indeed buried histories and secret lives become a major thematic thread in The Stranger’s Child. Not until Paul Bryant appears and undertakes a properly inquisitive literary biography is the full truth about Cecil explored, and by that time the resulting shock is short-lived, though the book establishes Paul’s literary reputation, without jeopardizing his own secret life. Swirling around the story of Cecil’s life and legacy, Hollinghurst tells a number of other stories: of the decline of the British Empire and its aristocratic traditions; of the changing attitudes toward homosexuality in English literary culture; of the emergence of modernism, and death of Victorian aesthetics, in art and architecture; of the erosion of English country life under late-twentieth-century urban sprawl; and of the vagaries of literary reputation. On a philosophical level, the novel explores with great acuity the limits of our ability to grasp the truth of another’s life, especially perhaps a writer’s life, long after his death. Hollinghurst’s exquisite fiction about literary biography seems to imply that biography is itself a kind of fiction, relying as it does upon the mixed motives and slippery memories of those who never fully knew the subject in the first place. But the pleasures of The Stranger’s Child reside as much in its language, and its almost microscopic social nuances—which Hollinghurst describes more vividly and entertainingly than any other novelist writing today—as in its larger concerns. Fortunately, the reader doesn’t have to choose, as the subtle details support and propel the novel’s thematic integrity from the first page to the last.
“A remarkable, unmissable achievement, written with the calm authority of an author who could turn his literary gifts to just about