The Stranger's Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger’s Child is Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance. Sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle is reading Tennyson in a hammock in the garden of Two Acres, the family home in suburban London. Her brother George arrives to visit with his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a handsome, assured and sometimes outrageous young man with a burgeoning reputation as a poet. After a tantalizing and dramatic weekend Cecil writes a long poem in Daphne’s autograph album as a parting gift. It is titled “Two Acres,” and both Daphne and George (whose feelings for Cecil also go well beyond mere friendship) immediately see how important the poem is – but none of them can foresee the complex and lasting effects it will have on all their lives.  When the next section of the novel begins, everything has Daphne is married to Cecil’s brother Dudley Valance; George to a historian named Madeleine; and Cecil is dead, killed by a sniper in World War One. A Cabinet officer and man of letters named Sebastian Stokes is compiling an edition of Cecil’s poems. He is especially curious about Cecil’s personal (and passionate) letters and unpublished poems, papers that seem to have gone missing.  The book leaps forward to a party to celebrate Daphne’s seventieth birthday. We meet Peter Rowe, a music teacher, and his boyfriend, Paul Bryant, a bank employee with a feeling for Cecil’s poetry. Soon Paul is taking up an idea that Peter to write a biography of Cecil Valance. It means making some startling discoveries about a past that the Valance family would prefer to keep in sepia and shadows. The Stranger’s Child is that rare thing, a historical novel whose characters, in their passions and betrayals, constantly surprise the reader, and will surely be read for generations to come.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Historical, British Literature, Literary Fiction

448 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 27, 2011

About the author

Alan Hollinghurst is an English novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.

He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.

In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London. In 1997, he went on an Asia book tour in Singapore.

In 1981 he joined The Times Literary Supplement and was the paper's deputy editor from 1982 to 1995.

He lives in London.

Reviews

[Kevin Ansbro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I don't read Booker Prize-winning author Alan Hollinghurst for his storytelling. In truth, the lyrical beauty of his flawless writing almost negates the need for a story. So my five-star rating is solely for his penmanship (though he doesn't employ synonyms for the word "said". The repetition of "he said/she said" dialogue tags is hard to ignore).
Alas, the story, such as it is, drags itself along like a beached turtle.
This ambitious (and lengthy) novel is rather difficult to describe; an English upper-class/middle-class love triangle with a smattering of homoerotica thrown in – a Brideshead-meets-Atonement hybrid, but without a plot. I felt as if I was witnessing an evolution, rather than anything resembling a story.
So, in truth, it was tedious. The author, like Ian McEwan, is undeniably one of Britain's finest writers and, as is true of McEwan, it's his elegant prose that steals the show. Hollinghurst is an artist in command of his craft but the whole, unfortunately, was less than the sum of its parts and if I were to rate the actual story, it would only merit a measly two stars.

Still, Hollinghurst is a highly gifted writer. Most authors out there would hate to have him peering over their shoulders while they’re tapping at a keyboard, so who am I to award him anything less than five lustrous stars?

Nonexistent story ... two stars
Top-tier prose .... five stars
Writing wins!

[Cecily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This tells a riveting and complex saga with profound insight, plenty of intrigue and dashes of wit. From the first dozen pages, even the first few sentences, I was drawn into a love affair with the writing of this book. I read large chunks more than once because the writing is breathtaking, but leisurely: I wanted to capture the craft and jot down many quotes (see the end of this for a long selection).

Having finished, I still love it, even though the quality was not quite maintained. It is a story told in five parts and spanning a century. The first two parts are superb (and have echoes of Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) and Byatt's "The Children's Book" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... the third is good, and the last two are too different to fit well with what’s gone before, and the ending is unsatisfyingly abrupt. It's not so much that the later sections are bad as the fact they just didn't "fit" the rest of the book and suffer in comparison with what precedes them. It almost felt as if they were there to bang home the themes of truth, memories, aging, changing mores etc, just in case we didn't notice them in the earlier sections. It's another way in which it resembles "The Children's Book": the best aspects are stunning, but it is also very flawed

Although Hollinghurst is well known as a gay writer (both himself, and his books), and this does feature gay relationships and illustrate how attitudes have changed over the last hundred years, it felt like a family saga, rather than a gay book.

PLOT

The key character appears to be a budding poet, Cecil Valence. He enters the story in 1913 as the wealthy university friend of middle class George Sawle. All the characters in the coming hundred years and 500+ pages have some sort of connection with him, but really it is George’s sister Daphne who is the pivot of the tangled stories. And they are tangled: there is a web of relationships, with lies, suppressed longings, and secrets, so one is often unsure who fancies who and who knows what about whom.

Subsequent sections are in the mid 1920s, mid 1960s, around 1990 and the present day (2011/12). The first two sections have a strong sense of place: the Sawle’s suburban home, Two Acres, and then the Valence’s enormous Victorian estate, Corley Court. These sections have very strong echoes of “Brideshead”, yet don’t feel derivative (a skillful balancing act). In later sections, the characters and plot are rather more adrift.

I enjoyed the deliberate obfuscation of the sudden time jumps at the start of each section, e.g. not being immediately sure who labels such as "husband" and "dead brother" applied to, or who “Mrs Jacobs” was (not always the most obvious one). I just didn't enjoy the characters, style and milieu of the later parts quite as much.

CHARACTERS

The Valences and Sawles are the main characters – along with their respective homes (again, like Brideshead). A new wife “felt she wouldn’t have chosen it, felt it had in a way chosen her”.

The changing zeitgeist and the aging and maturing of the characters are generally very good: insightful, amusing and plausible.

The opening word (“she”) refers to Daphne, a central character throughout, though not always the most important. As she says of herself in old age, “I never pretended to be a wonderful writer, but I have known some very interesting people.”

The contrasts between what people say, feel, mean and are thought to mean by others are clearly but delicately marked, especially in the first section, when Daphne is juggling sibling rivalry with the first stirrings of attraction, whilst still very naïve about such things. Other characters have things to hide (relationships, drink, money problems). Daphne often “felt again she was missing something, but was carried along by the excitement of making [adult] conversation”.

THEMES

CLASS
Class difference, deference, aspiration and the consequences of social mobility (up and down) are obvious themes that affect all the characters. Is “unthinking social confidence” the same as being a snob? One woman had “a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted” (so much summed up in that pithy sentence) and another “hadn’t been born into [X’s] world, even though she now wore its lacquered carapace”. At the other end of the spectrum, a humble bank clerk feels socially awkward from knowing, via people’s financial circumstances, that they may not be all that they seem.

TRUTH and WRITING
More importantly, several characters write (poetry, biography, memoirs, criticism). Questions of “what is the truth?”, “who knows what?” and the way we edit our own and other people’s histories weave through the book and are pertinent to all the main characters, especially those burdened with secrets (whether their own or those of others). Memoirs are “not fiction… but a sort of poetical reconstruction”. Are such edits usually unconscious, and if not, are they justifiable? They certainly make it hard for biographers, one of whom complains, “People wouldn’t tell you things, and they then blamed you for not knowing them.” Then he realised “The writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come” – and this aspect is perhaps the dominant theme of the book, creating a Russian-doll like structure of nested histories.

SECRECY
The subtle dynamics of covert relationships are carefully drawn, especially early on, managing to create a degree of ambiguity and at the same time, giving the reader the feeling of being “in the know”. Later on, there is additional dramatic tension from the characters’ own doubts about some things, and even the reader’s doubts about which characters know what: George was “amused by its [a poem] having a secret and sadly reassured by the fact it could never be told.”

HOMOSEXUALITY
I feel as if this ought to be a major theme, and possibly Hollinghurst would like it to be, but it never felt like a big deal to me. Yes, several characters are gay or bisexual, and some are secretive about their desires, but the desire and the secrecy seemed more pertinent than the sex of the people they were attracted to. Having sections set in different periods does illustrate how society has become more accepting, but maybe that's just society growing up?

AGING and MATURITY
The main characters span a variety of ages, which presents a challenge that Hollinghurst rises to. In particular, the Edwardian Daphne’s teenage desires and anxieties are wonderfully done. When offered a cigar, “She really didn’t want the cigar, but she was worried by the thought of missing a chance at it. It was something none of her friends had done, she was pretty sure of that.” So she took it “with a feeling of shame and duty and regret”. Whether it was a cigar or something else, I’m sure we can all empathise with Daphne’s mixed emotions. Similarly, being in on (partial) adult knowledge isn’t always what one wants or expects, “the joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind”. Pondering her first kiss, she “savoured the shock of it properly… With each retelling, the story… made her heart race a fraction less… and her reasonable relief at this gradual change was coloured with a tinge of indignation”.

DRINK
Several characters drink too much, though some are more aware of it than others: “the tray of bottles, some friendly, some over-familiar, one or two to be avoided”.


WRITING STYLE

The opening chapter is particularly entrancing: it captures the anticipation of the forthcoming evening, coupled with the evening light, in a series of subtly beautiful images about relationships, awkwardness, and ease, presaging all that is to come. There are wonderful images and great insight throughout. It might be thought to be overwritten, but I enjoyed the detail.

THE TITLE

Who is the eponymous "stranger's child"? For a while that question niggled (it's a phrase from Tennyson), and there are one or two candidates, but later I felt it didn't really matter, and was perhaps just a metaphor for each child's uniqueness, and, in some respects, their unknowability.

QUOTATIONS

• “Something of the time of day held her, with its hint of a mystery she had so far overlooked… It was the long still moment when the hedges and borders turned dusky and vague, but anything she looked at closely… seemed to give itself back to the day with a secret throb of colour.”
• “The slight asperity that gave even her nicest remarks an air of sarcasm.”
• Jonah was only 15, had never acted as a valet (or even observed one) and was told to “unpack… and arrange the contents ‘convincingly’. This was the word, enormous but elusive, that Jonah had had on his mind all day… gripping him again with a subtle horror.” Later, he had “The strange feeling of being intimate with someone who was simultaneously unaware of him.”
• Even the legitimate offspring of a respectable dead father can feel it a social handicap in Edwardian times: “He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and for ever having to make do.”
• Outrageous letters were like “Pompeiian obscenities, hiding just out of view behind the curtains and in the shadows of the inglenook.”
• “Records were indeed marvels, but they were only tiny helpings of the ocean of music.”
• A 16-year old “picked up her glass and drained it with a complicated feeling of sadness and satisfaction that was thoroughly endorsed by Wagner’s restless ballad.”
• For some reason, this tickled me, “… said Daphne experimentally”.
• A couple had “their little myth of origins, its artificiality part of its erotic charm”.
• “The remark [a compliment] seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.”
• “His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape.”
• A woodland pond was “a loose ellipse of water”.
• He had “a very particular way of looking at her… of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on… She felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made.”
• “moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement.”
• “spread some butter on her toast, though really her smothered anxiety had squeezed up her appetite to nothing.”
• Of a somewhat back-handed compliment: “her involuntary German air of meaning rather more.”
• She “held back, with a thin fixed smile, in which various doubts and questions were tightly hidden.”
• A dining room “with its gaudy décor, its mirrors and gilding” was “like some funereal fairground”!
• People who had loved and feuded came together to share memories of someone who had died, “submissively clutching their contributions. A dispiriting odour of false piety and dutiful suppression seemed to rise from the table and hang like cabbage-smells in the jelly-mould domes of the ceiling”.
• Tact required a “courteous saunter around an unmentionable truth” and “a mist of delicacy had obscured the subject”.
• “The dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare… Chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds.”
• They “looked more like colleagues than a couple” because “their hands seemed somehow locked away from any mutual use”.
• “Bland evasiveness had slowly assumed the appearance of natural forgiveness.”
• He “turned to her with that unstable mixture of indulgence and polite bewilderment and mocking distaste that she had come to know and dread and furiously resent.”
• After one character’s boorish outburst at a children’s party “a collective effort at repair had been made”, one couple “having an ideally boring conversation about shooting to show that things were under control”!
• After dinner, there was “talk of a game. Those who were keen half smothered their interest, and those who weren’t pretended blandly that they didn’t mind.”
• “It was the most unapproachable room in the house… dark with prohibitions. His father’s anger… had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair.”
• “His features seemed rather small and provisional.”
• “The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day.”
• “At this indefinable time of day… The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous.”
• A lodger’s room: “Nothing went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house… the brown wool rug made by Mr Marsh himself at what must have been a low moment.”
• The PE teacher “dressed in sports kit at improbable times of day, he was adored by many of the boys, and instinctively avoided by others.”
• “In the deepening shadows between pools of candlelight, the guests… conversations stretching and breaking, in an amiable jostle… like a flickering frieze, unknowable faces all bending willingly to something perhaps none of them individually would have chosen to do.”
• “eagerness struggling with some entrenched habit of disappointment.”
• Daphne’s copious bag had “the family trait of being shapelessly bulky – too bulky, really, to count as a handbag. It admitted as much in its helpless slump.”
• “The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.”
• “The perfect but impersonal dentures that gave their own helpless eagerness to an old man’s face” – the same man with “the eagerness and charm, the smile confidently friendly but not hilarious, the note of respect with a hint of conspiracy.”
• “Her sense of humour is really no more than an irritable suspicion that someone else might find something funny.”
• A house heaving with clutter creates “a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent” (a lesson for me).
• “The air of mildly offended blankness, which is the default expression of any congregation.”
• “X and his computer lived together in intense co-dependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it.”

[Paul Bryant]

GOODREADS REVIEWER TO SUE BOOKER PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR

- Associated Press, 23 May 2012


"I am appalled," says Goodreads reviewer Paul Bryant, speaking at his pleasant Nottingham home earlier today. "Friends had told me of this but I had brushed it aside as a matter below my concern. But then I stumbled upon an article in the Guardian and after reading that the bottom just fell out of my world. I will have to sue Alan Hollinghurst for damages now."

The article in question, entitled "The Booker can Drive People Mad" by Rachel Cooke, appeared in the 20th May edition. In it, Paul learned of a character in Mr Hollinghurst's latest novel which is clearly based on himself, even to the extent of having his own name. Mr Bryant pointed out the following passages :


The Stranger's Child, a capacious and wonderful book that begins in one suburban garden in 1913 and ends in another in 2008, has many themes. It is about love, and the passing of time; it is, too, about ambition, taste and disappointment. But more than anything, it is about the unknowability of human beings, and the misunderstandings, even the danger, associated with trying to plug the gaps in our perceptions.

Its nastiest and perhaps most memorable character is Paul Bryant, an enterprising hack reviewer and the would-be biographer of Cecil Valance, the Rupert Brooke-ish figure whose short life and long but ever-shifting literary reputation crouches at the heart of The Stranger's Child.

Bryant makes a living poking around in people's lives – and I have the impression that his creator disapproves. When he goes to stay with Daphne Sawle, for whom, when she was a girl, Cecil Valance wrote a famous poem, she likens him to a "little wire-haired ratter"; she knows, even before he has lobbed his first question, that all he is interested in, basically, is "smut".

I place my own tape recorder down on the small table beside us. I half expect it to explode, like a grenade. So, does he loathe Paul?

"Well, I wanted to depict him changing," he says, carefully. "And one knows how sweet young people can turn into monsters and bores." They curdle. "Yes, exactly. They curdle."

He wasn't always going to be a novelist, though. Poetry was his first love. An only child, he grew up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where his father was a bank manager (he poured this time into The Stranger's Child: Paul Bryant begins his working life in a bank in a small, country town, where he reads Angus Wilson in his lunch hour, and gets turned on by the angle of his stool at the cash desk).

The real Paul Bryant, visibly distressed, beat his kitchen table and said "I wish to make it very plain, I have never been turned on by the angle of my stool... the very idea... is repulsive."

He acknowledges that this will be a David and Goliath contest, and that Mr Hollinghurst will have powerful resources to defend his novel in court. "I have to do this - it is my very character which is at stake here. I do not wish my children's children to believe that I was ever a little wire-haired ratter. And to call me in print a hack reviewer. Well! I just don't understand why he has done this. What have I ever done to Alan Hollinghurst? But he will have to pay now, and dearly."

Mr Hollinghurst was unavailable for comment.

[William2 · Rating 2 out of 5]

.

[Jaidee (lost in Vegas for a few days) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars !.....both delicious and grand....this book has enough material for a literary trilogy...a wonderful literary romp through time....this book has it all- poetry, architecture, bisexual trysts, intrigue, clever dialogue and a story that is both playful and profound....one of my favorite novels of all time is A.S. Byatt's Possession and this book reads very much like that one but only with a more queer bent....

[Mike Keirsbilck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Last week I read Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. And boy, what an ordeal this has been. The whole novel just didn't appeal to me. It started out as some sort of Wuthering Heights spin-off, but with a gay twist to it. One of the lovers heroically dies in war, and becomes a well-known poet. The rest of the story is more or less a quest of remembering the dead poet. Throughout the twentieth century people start to take an interest in the poet, and even a biography is being set up. The relationships between the characters start to echo the relationships between the nineteenth century characters at the beginning of the novel. And lo and behold... It even results in a new gay relationship. A relationship that was forecasted by the relation between the poet and his lover. So, with some good will, you might read the novel as an alternative, gay, history of England. And although that might have its merits, it just didn't appeal to me. Firstly, I do like coming-of-age stories, but I don't like plain moral or sentimental drama. To me, that particular genre has gotten old after Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Perhaps it's because as a man, I lack the finesse to grasp the subtle stabs at the human condition, but to me it's just boring.
So, I usually keep away from novels like that. But Hollinghurst's novel came critically acclaimed and applauded for its wit and stirring narrative. So I caved, though I should've known better.
The narrative is simply grinding to a halt after the first chapter. The first chapter didn't quite appeal to me as well, but I did have the feeling it was going somewhere. Yet, it just came to a halt after the first chapter and the poets death. So nothing stirring there. In fact, I couldn't find one aspect of suspense in the entire novel. Really disappointing. And wit and funny? I haven't chuckled once throughout the entire novel. It just completely missed its mark, as far as I'm concerned.
The only redeeming feature is Hollinghurst's prose. He does know how to write. His sentences are well-balanced and properly paced. On the syntax-level, this book is very well written. That's the only reason I found the stamina to push through and read the novel. Otherwise I'd given up after chapter 2.
But it has been an eye-opener. I really ought to steer away from novels like this, no matter how critically acclaimed they come. These novels are just not my cup of tea.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a perverse delectation of delay I waited until the US release of The Stranger’s Child. In spells of impatience I would Google the UK reviews, and read them in a skimming, self-protective way, veering from spoilers, and keeping mostly to the opening and closing paragraphs of generalized acclaim. From review to review the memes were Brideshead Revisited (there’s an estate), Atonement (there’s a naïve young girl), and the extent of the novel’s ambition. I can say nothing about the alleged Waugh or McEwan parallels—but this novel is mightily ambitious. Hollinghurst hasn’t worked on this scale before. Even to the last pages he’s adding panels, drafting new figures and applying new glazes to the familiar colors of seemingly finished ones. The valid dissent—made best by Daniel Mendelsohn in the latest New York Review of Books—that the novel is decorous and undersexed and faintly reactionary—that Hollinghurst’s antiquarianism is now detached from, and no longer strictly in service of, his subversion—shouldn’t distract us from the technical expansion he has made, the enormous canvas he has filled.


Hollinghurst’s first two novels, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Folding Star (1994), are contemporary benchmarks of the lyrical first-person—lush, atmospheric, and superbly modulated. The voice of Edward Manners in particular, narrator of The Folding Star, has a resonance, a reach, a verbal roominess that at times feels Humbert-like (his sexual obsession also Humbert-like). In The Spell (1997) Hollinghurst tried the lofty third person and an interwoven ensemble. I think I like The Spell more than most people—the style has a very bracing epigrammatic nip—but I did have some trouble distinguishing the four puppet-like principals, as they hopped in and out of each other’s beds. The novel seems a crude prototype of the masterfully organized The Line of Beauty, the members of that novel’s numerous cast (except Catherine) ample and finished and shown in the “full richness of their relation” (a Jamesian phrase I’m just making up as I type). I remember thinking: where does he go next? Well, he goes bigger. He doubles the number of characters, surveys England and its literary/sexual manners from 1913 to 2008, and mounts to a loftiness of narration just below that of the historian, while retaining all the domestic intimacy of a novelist of manners.


Hollinghurst reconciles the novelist and the historian, where their respective narrative styles of disclosure and insinuation conflict, in an episodic, even fragmentary structure, telling us how Things Change by showing us two families, and their lovers and servants and stalking biographers, as they live—heedlessly and free of portent—at widely spaced points in the twentieth century. These perches of alighting are the Georgian twilight of 1913, when gardens still spoke Tennyson; the voguish cynicism of 1926, grand rooms in Victorian piles “boxed in” the save on heating and hung with quasi-Cubist portraits, and whiskey and laughter in their mouths, and “archly suspicious” Stracheyesque superciliousness on their faces; a sleepy rural town in 1967, a landscape perhaps autobiographically dear to Hollinghurst, one of yearning and loneliness and cherished film stills of shirtless male stars; 1980, rain, machinations, rummaging in old memories; and 2008, where the dark strong room that once hid the gay love letters of 1913 is searched by the fitful light of an iPhone screen. I saw (heard?) Hollinghurst read last week. When asked from the audience about his historical research for the book, he replied that he kept research to a minimum—he wanted no frames or overtures, no cheesy inartistic portent, and simply wished to “plunge” the reader into the new strange place not knowing what year it was, or if they knew the people suddenly talking, and if not what relation these new people might have to the characters they did already know. The wars are fought, the headlines screech, the empire crumbles, the revelations shock…but off-stage. It is pertinent that Hollinghurst has translated Racine; he keeps the classical unities.


So…The Stranger’s Child is ambitious. But does he pull it off? I think so. And it comforts me to think that the boring parts are just rough models for the Proustian mega-novel he’ll drop on us in 2020. Hollinghurst also said after the grueling labor of The Line of Beauty, he started to write short stories, but the four or five he managed soon began to “twitch together” into this novel. It’s really up to each reader to decide which episode is the most accomplished, and which the weak link. James Wood, in The New Yorker, raves about the third, the 1967, which bored me, even as I appreciated its thematic centrality. 1967 introduced new characters who never became quite as compelling as the Valances and the Sawles, the original two families. My own preference for the 1913 and 1926 sections in conjunction (together they take up a little less than half of the novel) perhaps points to my suspicion that, like The Spell, The Stranger’s Child is a transitional work. Those ante- and immediately post-bellum episodes blew my mind, with their subtlety and sad wit, and each character’s lifelike blend of alteration and continuity—and recall that The Line of Beauty really only manages a single time shift, 1983 to 1986, and that among a smallish stable of characters. Where does he go next?

[Michele · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review may contain more information about the plot than you want to know.


The Times Literary Supplement called Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child "a master class in the art of the novel." The Independent said "It is a rare thing to read a novel buoyed up by the certainty that it will stand among the year's best, but rarer still to become confident of its value in decades to come." What? There must be some mistake. Maybe I'm not British enough to get the point.

This is the story of Cecil Valance, an aristocratic, handsome, energetic, self-absorbed gay poet. It opens in 1913 as Cecil visits his "friend," George Sawle and his family at their upper middle-class home. There he also meets the alcoholic widow Sawle, older brother Hubert and younger sister Daphne as well as a handsome young servant. Cecil is the love object of both George, with whom he is having an affair, and the naive but spirited Daphne, who has no idea that George and Cecil are an item. A neighbor, Harry Hewitt, joins the family for a dinner party. He is identified as a suitor of the widow Sawle, but Cecil can see that he is in love with Hubert, who is straight as an arrow. Hubert accepts the lavish gifts Harry offers, but rejects his affections. Daphne asks Cecil, who has already published some poems, to write in her autograph book. He writes a poem about their home, called Two Acres, which becomes famous. Daphne believes it to be about her, but George knows otherwise.

The scene changes to 1926 without any preparation, and the reader spends the next few pages figuring out what has happened and who's who. Finally it emerges that Daphne has married Cecil's younger brother, Dudley, who has been mentally as well as physically scarred by the war. Cecil has become an icon, though his poetry isn't all that good. His mother causes a tomb to be built in the family chapel with a life-sized carving of Cecil and consults mediums in an effort to communicate with him. Dudley is jealous, and becomes an awful man, ignoring his two children and giving his wife a very difficult time. They waste a lot of time drinking and partying and cheating on one another in the time of despair and disillusionment that is the '20's.. The children suffer.

In one leap, it is 1967, and the extended and blended Valance family is celebrating Daphne's 70th birthday. She is tottering around, a bit the worse for wear, still drinking and smoking. The reader has to work for it a while, but it finally becomes clear that Daphne has married three times. She split with Dudley, married a gay artist with whom she had a son, then when he died in WWII, she married a man named Jacobs who is not described in any detail. The manor house in which the Valance family had lived had become a boys' school. Two gay men are introduced, and one of them becomes the major actor in the remainder of the book.

It is 1977, and Paul Bryant is a writer who is researching his first book, which is a biography of Cecil Valance. He has some suspicions about Cecil and the other members of the family, and sets out to interview Dudley, Daphne, and various friends, servants and relatives. And here the book becomes a horrific waste of time as Paul stumbles around missing chance after chance to find out whether Cecil was gay and who fathered Daphne's children.

Fade to 2008, when the whole thing is wrapped up in an incomprehensible package. Gay men are out of the closet and joined in civil union. One more wild goose chase occurs, resulting in complete failure to find definitive information about Cecil. The morel of the story apparently, is that no one can truly be known by another person. if so, it was an enormously frustrating way to get there.

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading The Stranger's Child is like visiting a multi-leveled beautiful museum with each level dedicated to showcase a certain period in a nation's history.

Oh I still remember the delight and mixed feelings that I had when I visited the Auckland Museum in 2002. The ground floor houses the Maori and early settlers' artifacts, plants and faunas exclusively found in New Zealand. The second floor houses the WWI (where the NZ government sent delegations to Europe) and the different battles around that time. The third floor houses the WWII history including the unforgettable corner on the Holocaust. I almost cried listening, with concentration camp artifacts surrounding me, to the taped testimonies of Holocaust survivors. NZ was not directly part of Hitler's invasion but NZ, just like its neighboring sister Australia, shares a lot of culture with Europe. There were even people who flee Nazi soldiers by taking a boat to New Zealand.

That was the first time I've been to a big preeminent museum so it was a memorable visit and I was even almost alone in a that huge building for the whole day!!!

The reason why I likened this book, my second by Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child to this museum is the fact that the plot runs through a three generations at different particular years in their lives. It starts in the 1920's and ends in the 2008. The switch from one part to another could be jarring, at least for me. Starting each part is like to reading a new book with half of the characters new and the previous ones are older. Jarring because you tend to guess what happened in between and why is it focused on that year. Then you read on and get settled. But Hollinghurst ends that year and you have to go to the next distant year and you have to repeat the same experience.

However, the unseen thread, i.e., the theme, that unifies the whole book, is revealed in the end and it tied down the whole structure quite niftily. It's just that I wanted more. I wanted the story to have another year, say 2010's. I got attuned to Hollinghurst's tempo and trick and I wanted more.

I read some reviews though and I agree that while reading this book, if you have read some of the good British fictions, you will see some similarities about some parts of this book to what have already been written. I had a feeling at some points in my reading that Hollinghurst was craving for another Booker award so he concocted this book by incorporating what worked before in other Booker-winning works/English masterpieces:

One of the best English novels Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - for the two gay men and one innocent girl spending one summer's day in an English estate;

1989 Booker Winner Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - for the book's main message (my interpretation).

1990 Booker Winner Possession by A. S. Byatt - the poet as a character that unifies -as a backdraft - the whole story that runs through at least two generations;

2001 Booker Shortlisted Atonement by Ian McEwan - for the secret that was kept and revealed later;

2009 Booker Shortlisted The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt - the English family or families that grow from being young or children to adults to grandparents.

I am not a novelist, in fact I haven't really tried writing yet. However, I admired Hollinghurt's The Line of Beauty and I gave it a 4-star rating here on Goodreads. But this book, The Stranger's Child for me seems to be written by him with another Booker as a target. I am not saying that it is not a good objective but it somehow compromised the whole appeal of the book. It's like an artist making a masterpiece statue getting the eyes of Venus, the smile of Mona Lisa, the lips of Angelina Jolie, the behind of Jennifer Lopez, the legs of Britney Spears and the bosom of Paris Hilton.

But the book has a huge scope, multiple layers, several story lines that can stand as separate books or short stories, many memorable characters and the writing is flawless. In the end, Hollinghurst delivered again.

It's just too big to fail. Too imposing not to notice. Too beautiful not to like.

[Justina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The two stars here rates my enjoyment level of this book rather than my valuation of the writing, which I'd give a four, and Hollinghurst's perceptive understandings of human foible and social identity. I'd give those a six. I perfectly understand the prize nominations and love of his work expressed widely on this site, but at the same time I was underwhelmed by the novel as a whole.

As a resume of a certain kind of middle class British repression centred on the theme of male homosexuality, gradually evolving from coded stuttering to coded flamboyance, it's a perfectly good portrait. The lesser portraits of all the characters that make it up are rounded, differentiated...it's all there. Taken as a whole the multiple views across the timespan are a beautifully put together thing, very satisfying in that respect.

And still I was bored senseless most of the time. Since this is true of me and many literary novels I put it down to a difference of taste and interest between myself and this genre of book. When I remove my personal reaction and look at it through the Artistic Value Goggles, it's very good. And I love his moments of insight, the breadth and depth of his vision, the metaphors, the complexity and even his sentences. Just...zzzz

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts as a nice, late 19th century society novel, very conventionally told and playing in the upper British class. But appearances are deceiving, because Hollinghurst has made a pretty ingenious piece of work with alternating time periods, different storytelling perspectives and several layers of meaning.

There are quite a few connecting elements between the 5 time frames that the author provides us with (starting in 1913, ending in 2008). The aristocratic Daphne Sawle in the first place: in the beginning she's still a jumpy teenager of 16, and towards the end a lucid, but very reserved lady of more than 80; around her circulate her brother George, her (ex) husband Dudley and some of her children. And then there is the impressive Cecil Valance, the "young god - slash - poet not-without-merit", who died in the First World War, but returns in every period of time, in the form of a marble tomb, always the object of speculation about who he really was. And finally, gay love is also a recurring storyline; in the first time frames it still is surrounded by taboo and secrecy, later of course much less; the nice thing is that Hollinghurst uses the gay theme as an ordinary story element and not provocative as with other authors.

In my opinion, the central focus of this novel is the debilitating effect of time, more specifically its harshness and inexorableness (at the beginning of every new time frame all sorts of dramatic things appear to have happened in the years before). But it is especially disconcerting to see how the protagonists themselves deal with that past: they manipulate it, consciously and unconsciously, distort the most essential data or withhold them, or simply forget them, so that it is impossible for others (later) to discover the 'real' past. To my opinion that is the strongest layer of meaning of this novel: all protagonists are "stranger's children", namely estranged from their own past; you have to take this literally, because it is striking how all relationships in this novel (between lovers, spouses, brothers and sisters, but also between parents and children) in time become distant, cynical or even hostile. And Hollinghurst also illustrates it figuratively in the decay of the great country houses where the novel started.

So, it's really interesting what Hollinghurst presents in this novel. But there are also a few drawbacks: the constant introduction of new characters in every time frame works quite alienating; the novel starts in a smashing and fascinating way, but gradually the tempo slows down, and certainly towards the end the focus is on highly detailed, very 'loaden' conversations (where you have to keep an eye on what is being manipulated, and what is unspoken), and that is a pretty demanding read; and finally, the end itself was a bit of a letdown for me, like an emptying balloon. But anyway: my first encounter with Hollinghurst certainly tastes like more.

[Karen·]

"We can find you anything you want."
"Mm, I may well have to call on you."
"Now that all information is retrievable..."
"Quite a thought, isn't it?"

Indeed, quite a thought. A fallacy that we are prey to in our age of internet and permanent access to all that it provides. This delightful, elegant, lush tale proves how shaky that ground is. The 'hard' facts - what an image! - of a person's life. They can never be retrieved. Memories are re-written, fudged, distorted or simply lost, evidence remains hidden, photos too small and unfocussed and artificially posed to betray anything, even the sound recordings made by the hapless biographer are faded, fuzzy and futile. All that remains is speculation. Make of it what you will.

And on top of that a history of changing attitudes to homosexuality. And on top of that a story of myth-making around the Lost Generation. And an awfully good read. No; less awfully, more bloody, as Tennyson apparently said (or did he?).

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book rescued me. For that I am eternally grateful. It rescued me from lapsing into a boredom induced coma while sitting in a hilux in a field in the middle of the Cheshire countryside. What was I doing sitting in a field in such an environmentally unfriendly vehicle? (Hey don't diss the hilux, that car is my baby)

I was sitting in a field waiting for a bunch of builders to turn up and dig some holes.... but they were at least two hours late every day. Now just because this book rescued me does not mean I'll be overcome and provide an effusive five star review. A solid three stars for a very solid book.

Unfortunately this book was solid in the way that chunky knit cardies, sensible shoes and school-dinner puddings are solid; a sort of presentable filling English solidness which persisted beyond the end of the Edwardian era and was then well and truly squished by the end of WWII. There are elements of glamour at the beginning (pre WWI) when the novel's beating, erotically charged heart Cecil Valance, makes an appearance, but once he's off the scene the rest of the people just aren't quite as interesting. Cecil had a vibrancy and vivacity that were very much his own, much like dear Sebastian in Brideshead. And there it is - the inevitable but probably unavoidable comparison with Waugh and as the story develops, with Ian McEwan also. Most other reviewers have referenced these 20th century writers as well so I'm not telling you anything new really, just a gentle reminder.

The story chases a meandering path through five generations of a family and pretty much traces the decline of the lower branches of the Edwardian aristocracy through two wars and up to the present day. Wealth is divided, family homes sold off and turned into schools, former diamond armoured matriarchs with scandalous youths behind them holed up in states of semi-reclusive dilapidation in small cottages in the Home Counties. You can smell the moth balls and spilled gin leaping off the page at you. And because it is Hollinghurst there is one gay character per generation of provides a voice for the group.

Well written with some lovely details but personally I'd rather have read an entire book based in Cecil Valance's exploits.

[Biogeek · Rating 2 out of 5]

It kills me to give two stars to a book that took me the better part of a week to read, that has all the trappings of a book I would enjoy, and that will probably go on to win a mantel of literary awards. But, at the end of the 564 pages, I feel let down by weak story telling carefully hidden by lyrical writing, beautiful settings and a probing look at changes in British society over the last century.

Fans of the book have alluded to the author's ability to present readers with the subtlety of human emotion and reaction. I was bored very early by his constant descriptions of how every line was uttered, or actually meant something else. Every piece of dialog seems to be followed by an explanatory line. "'You have, you have,' said Daphne, feeling at once how the joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind." Sometimes the dialog could have stood up by itself without the expository crutches. Like one of his minor characters, Hollinghurst seems to be enjoying a game of 'adverbs'.

I did enjoy the structure of the book, with the characters of Daphne and Cecil remaining central to the novel, but approached through the eyes of different characters during different parts of the 20th century. Hollinghust takes a bit of a jab at the growing genre of literary mysteries-a-la-Dan Brown, leading us to believe that the true story is somewhere in the hidden letters of Cecil.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's taken me a long time to get around to reading a Hollinghurst novel and I wish I'd done so sooner. His writing is a revelation: great characterisation, a wonderful evocation of time and place and beautiful, beautiful prose. One of the things I particularly love about this novel - which is in five sections, each set in a different year from 1913 to 2008 - is the way in which Hollingurst plunges the reader into each part of the narrative. I also love seeing the central character, Daphne Sawle, at a number of stages in her life, from childhood to extreme old age. It's a bit like seeing a person's entire life, speeded up by time lapse photography. Overall, while the novel has its flaws, it's an interesting story, extremely well told. And it will probably make me approach literary biographies differently in future. Hollinghurst really brings home how the sources used by biographers are only as reliable as their memory and their self-interest allow them to be. This was an extremely engaging novel to read and I very much enjoyed sharing it with my friend Jemidar.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wish I'd been a stranger to buying this...

This is one of our finest writers. He has an ability to present prose and observation with such elegance and deserves his place on the shelves.

Not with this one, though.

This starts out so well...the idea of a WW1 poet is engaging and the place and time and the characters draw you in and it's wonderful...and then you see you're 18% through and you think...what? More? The book then rambles on and I turned over page after page of prose that could have been cut and added nothing to the characters to whom, really, does anything happen?


By the end, I cared about nothing but finishing the damned thing.

Tragically, I won't buy another Hollinghurst.

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only give this book 2.5 stars which when rounded up is 3. Sometimes with reviews I give books 3 strong stars. This is a weak 3 stars. 🙁

I can’t tell you what the denouement is. Usually my reasoning is that while I understand the denouement, I would not want to give it away in a review because then what is the point of you reading both the book and reviews that tell you every last thing about the book? But in this case, I don’t know what the denouement is. I’ll be glad to read other people’s reviews so perhaps I can become enlightened.

I guess this is a book about unreliable narrators. With some books, I like that. But not this one. I was on the very last fricking page of this 435-page book wondering if something revealing would finally be revealed but nope. 😐 😑 🤨

I was expecting a much better book based on the accolades on the back cover...from the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other UK periodicals.

The book is divided into 5 parts and the book started out strong and with promise...it held my interest. Main characters in the first part are Daphne, the precocious 16-year old...her older brother by about two years, George...an even older brother Hubert (22 years old)...their mother, the matriarch of the family...and a friend of George’s who is visiting him, Cecil Valance, who is making a name for himself as a poet at Cambridge. Near the end of the first part it is apparent that Cecil is gay because he and George are secretly getting it on. But then Cecil tries to French kiss (and perhaps more) Daphne, so it appears perhaps he is bisexual.

Starting about halfway through the book I was asking myself where this book could possibly go. There was no “there there” ...no smoking gun....nothing bad or necessarily good that anybody had done so far in the book. There appears to be a number of men in the book who are gay and depending on the time period in which the events are taking place (as early as 1913 and as late as 2008) the men have to keep it secret (back then) or they can be totally upfront about it (i.e., 2008).

For some reason this book reminded me of Ian McEwan’s Atonement...unreliable narrator in that book...events taking place circa WWI...I sure liked that book a helluva lot more than this one.

I was reading the reviews (below)....and the third reviewer makes this point....and I agree with them up to a point...the point where the reviewer enjoyed having to figure out with each part who the new people are and how they are connected to people from the previous part(s)....I found it to be a chore after the second part and did not like it.
• Some dozen years pass between Part One and Part Two. Part Three begins in 1967 in a bank at closing time. With each new part, the reader, like a time traveler, is catapulted forward and dropped down without ceremony into the story a number of years hence, trying to figure out what has happened to the characters left behind, not to mention what their new married names may be. Puzzling it all out makes for gratifying literary sport, filled with cunning surprises.

Reviews (if you are going to read the book, read these reviews afterwards...they give way too much away!):
• https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/bo...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue...

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Story is not going anywhere interesting. Quite torturous actually...

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only other Alan Hollinghurst book I've read is the beautiful but disturbing Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty, which, from what I can gather, is typical of his work. The Stranger's Child, then, is a departure: while homosexuality and gay relationships are a strong theme throughout the book, it is a family saga spanning almost a hundred years - stretching from the eve of the First World War to the present day - and is the first Hollinghurst novel to feature major female characters. Divided into five parts, the book follows several generations of the Sawle and Valance families. Cecil Valance - first introduced as the young lover of George Sawle - is the central figure of The Stranger's Child; a bisexual poet and aesthete, he achieves fame - and creates an impact which will resonate throughout history - with a poem titled "Two Acres", ostensibly a message of ardour directed at George's teeenage sister, Daphne. Daphne is the secondary protagonist, and while Cecil remains frozen in time as an increasingly mythical figure, we follow her through youthful infatuation, marriage, motherhood, family life and old age. Later, a younger character is introduced: Paul Bryant, an aspiring writer whose obsession with Cecil and the two families' entwined histories leads him to pen a speculative, sensational (and in fact remarkably accurate) biography.

I initially found it quite difficult to adapt to the narrative jumps between generations. After the opening, which I instantly loved, I struggled to get used to the second section. But by the time this ended, I had become so involved that I hated the next skip forward in time. However, by the end I was glad this device had been used; to see the impact of these characters on their descendants near to a century later gives the story a uniquely insightful feel. You really get the sense not only that you've genuinely known these people, but that you've travelled through time to see how the echoes of their thoughts, feelings and actions have reverberated down the years. Hollinghurst is clearly a fan of keeping the reader guessing - each of the sections opens in such a way that makes everything a complete mystery at first, with the truth gradually revealed; there are some witty red herrings in the narrative too, and the dates of each event are never actually given, just subtly implied through cultural changes, topics of conversation, the characters' manners and clothes.

Because the story takes leaps through time, it's impossible for me to discuss the plot in any detail without giving away significant spoilers - so I won't. However, I do really want to talk about how much I loved the party scene in the second section of the book. It's an absolute masterclass in writing; I actually don't understand how Hollinghurst managed to write it in such a way, as if you are there with the characters as they move from room to room, in the thick of the action, experiencing the confusion of drunken fragments of conversation and the disorientation caused by interaction between a number of people with disparate goals and desires. It's breathtakingly filmic and one of the most impressive and memorable scenes I have read in any book in recent memory. Surely, surely, a television adaptation of this novel must already have been mooted. Fans of Downton Abbey and the like would absolutely lap it up.

This was a slow, leisurely read rather than a compulsive one, but for all that I enjoyed it immensely. I was immediately drawn in by the first two sections, which bear what I'm sure is a deliberate resemblance to Brideshead Revisited; the period, the relationship between George and Cecil, the significance of the two families' houses ("Two Acres" and Corley Court, the latter clearly the book's Brideshead). I thought the book sagged in the middle somewhat, and the introduction of Paul was troublesome - he isn't likeable, though this is necessary for his character to work - but the plot gained momentum in the last few chapters and I found myself captivated by Paul's race to uncover the 'truth'. The short final section wrapped things up neatly - I enjoyed the fact that we see members of yet another new generation still obsessed by Cecil, suggesting that this will always continue while the man himself will remain an unknowable enigma. Therefore, the ending itself, in which Cecil's missing letters remain lost - perhaps forever,, seems a fitting conclusion even as it is a little frustrating. I didn't want the book to end, and I wished more time could have been spent on the final section - I understand that Paul's introduction was necessary as a bridge between the generations, but I think it could have been done with more brevity.

It's a real shame The Stranger's Child was excluded from this year's Booker shortlist, and I can't help but feel it's been snubbed precisely because it seemed like such an obvious choice. Though both were very good and neither perfect, I think The Stranger's Child has the edge over The Line of Beauty; its scope and ambition make it both more appealing and more resonant. I didn't fall head over heels in love with the book, but nevertheless, I believe it's worth the hype.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I was quick to deliver a three-star rating to this novel, I could consider dropping another star. Perhaps my biggest issue with this novel is that I did enjoy it...when Forster wrote it nearly a century ago in "Maurice" and then when Waugh wrote it in "Brideshead". I've always been hesitant of contemporary literature for this exact reason: it's too derivative. Much of the turn-of-the-century English literature aesthetic over saturates this novel, and while I do very much enjoy that setting, Hollinghurst's creativity was lacking.

My other issue with this novel stems from Hollinghurst's language. There are moments when he employs unparalleled prose, executed beautifully, but his linguistic acrobatics go unchecked for much of the novel to the point of over saturating the text and undermining what brilliant moments he does have. This also becomes problematic for what turns out to be a very ambitious novel.

Hollinghurst is clearly dealing with the development of queer identity, a theme that can be overwhelming to the point of unconquerable. Added to that, Hollinghurst plumbs the themes of memory, class struggle, and not one, but two wars. S I applaud Hollinghurst in his attempt to meld these themes, but they become buried under the avalanche of pretentious, inane dialogue passing between characters. Much of the conversation that passes between characters remains superfluous, but I found myself becoming exhausted attempting to discern if if a passing remark held something deeper or, as was most cases, just a superficial glib remark.

Admittedly, I wasn't entirely certain what I wanted from this novel, but I think Hollinhurst fell just a hair short.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel explores Hollinghurst’s usual themes: sexuality, family and social dynamics and the nature of art and artists. Added to this is an exploration of the persistence of time and the transience of human memory. This was a cracking good read to start the new year with.

My next book: May Contain Traces of Magic

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hollinghurst's writing is so precise. In every phrase he finds the perfect word. Yet the precision is in service to his storytelling and never overwhelms it. His specialty is human motivations and he seems to live inside each character equally, whether they are male, female, old, young, straight, gay. His understanding of the emotional landscape is complete.

The Stranger's Child begins in 1913, with the handsome aristocratic Cambridge student and poet Cecil Valance visiting his college friend George Sawle for several days. Cecil and George have become lovers, but Cecil's sexuality needs a variety of outlets and we find out later that he's had a relationship with George's kid sister Daphne. At the end of Cecil's brief visit with the Sawles he writes a poem in Daphne's autograph book, titled "Two Acres" after the Sawle family home; the poem is ostensibly meant for Daphne but as the novel's narrative continues through subsequent decades, it seems more likely that "Two Acres" has to do with his gay affair with George. After Cecil is killed in the First World War, the poem acquires a stature akin to Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," with Winston Churchill quoting it in a speech.

This novel loses momentum, though, after two strong opening sections. The mystery surrounding both the poem, and Cecil, George, and Daphne's romantic and sexual liaisons, gay and straight, dissipates. The reader's interest is invested in these three characters, and as Hollinghurst introduces new ones in the 1960s, 1980s, and finally in a brief concluding section set in 2008, we wonder why we should care about these people, the further removed they are from the story's Edwardian origins and youthful passions.

[Lazarus P Badpenny Esq · Rating 5 out of 5]

In fastidious - if occasionally fussy - prose Hollinghurst has fashioned his own kind of family saga - part Evelyn Waugh, part EM Forster, part Mary Wesley. Once again his writing exhibits all the heightened sensory awareness and self-conscious eroticism of an extended seduction. There is the perhaps inevitable comparison with Atonement, Ian McEwan's postmodern carbuncle - with all its internal workings hanging out like some Richard Rogers monstrosity - but this is much more a Palladian folly of a novel. And therein may lie its downfall with many of its narrative echoes too subtley clever for its own good. That said, and although there is a tendency towards self-parody (at times the reader may be forgiven for thinking that homosexuality was the best and only way to avoid having a 'bad' war - the death of Cecil Valance, the all-but-absent central character, a kind of collapsed supernova, a literary black hole about whose irresistible gravitational pull all the other characters irrevocably orbit, being the possible exception that proves the rule) - The Pale King notwithstanding and with the Murakami translation still to come - Hollinghurst may well have crafted the most satisfying literary novel of the year.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apparently I'm incapable of enjoying another "country house novel." After the archetypal Brideshead Revisted, is there any need for another? For the first 50 pages of The Stranger's Child I kept wondering if I was re-reading Atonement – The Stranger's Child is also narrated by a precocious pubescent girl observing the affairs of her elders. But before the long the Dance to the Music of Time doldrums took over, the meticulous descriptions of the preciosities of the English upper class, the sexless sex among the shrubberies, the repressed cigars and brandy after dinner… I was craving a sip of Saki.

Emboldened by a glowing review in The Guardian, I ordered a copy from Amazon UK. Sadly, £16.98 and 150 pages of Jamesian indirection later, I realized that I was approaching the book and its mannered ironies as a chore. I'll freely admit that this review broadcasts my inability to appreciate the writer whom Theo Tait described as "perhaps ... the best English novelist working today." The Swimming Pool Library had its wet charms, but I couldn't finish The Line of Beauty either. I enjoy erudite sodomy as much as the next guy but no more "gay sex pastorals" for me.

[Helene Jeppesen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really interesting story because it deals with the same woman through different periods of her life. One section can be about her adulthood, but then suddenly we skip to her in her 60s. The interesting thing lies in the way that we don't recognize what is going on during those skips. We suddenly encounter a cast of different characters and POVs, and it's not until several pages later we realize what that has to do with Daphne's, our main character's, story.
For that reason I wouldn't say that this is an easy book to read. I had to be focused in order to follow the storyline and the rather chaotic shifts happening. But once I did realize what was going on, I liked it a lot and was left with a smile on my face.
The execution of this story could've been better. At several places, I felt like the story was only relevant to the author but not to the reader. I couldn't see the point in including certain chapters, and I kind of felt like skimming them. That's why I ended up rating this book a good average 3/5 stars: It is most definitely worth a read because it's different from much else I've read, but the execution of it could have been a bit better, in my opinion.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

 
Reflections of a Life

So completely did Alan Hollinghurst draw me into his spell, that I drafted the first part of this review while poised at the end of Book One, the first hundred pages of this 560-page Man Booker nominated novel. It is a delicious opening, filled with potential; how that potential is resolved I had yet to discover.

Lying in the garden of Two Acres, a middle-class house in the northern environs of London, sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle reads poetry while waiting for her brother George to arrive with his weekend guest, an up-and-coming Cambridge poet named Cecil Valance. It is Summer 1913, although we work that out only gradually. Hollinghurst writes in his own beautifully expressive style, but is clearly evoking some of the classic tropes of English fiction: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, a touch or two borrowed back from Henry James, a nod to D. H. Lawrence. If there is war in the offing, it is no more than a passing hint; for now, there is nothing in the air but erotic possibility. And, this being Hollinghurst, the eroticism is mostly between men. I found it very different from the aggressive sex in The Line of Beauty, though, less an overt challenge to convention than a secret aesthetic refinement. And the atmosphere is made doubly delectable by being seen through the perception of the just-blossoming Daphne, a true Jamesian innocent still on the verge of experience.

As first presented, Cecil is not a very good poet, writing Edwardian pastoral like diluted Rupert Brooke, Swinburne, or Tennyson; he pens a poem in Daphne's autograph book as a parting gift. On one of the evenings, he reads to the Sawle family from Tennyson's "In Memoriam"—that great poem about male friendship and loss—including the stanza that includes the novel's title:

Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child.

It is as yet an oblique reference, suggesting how, with death, the love-starved world can fade and alter until it is recognized only by strangers of a later generation. Is this to be the theme of the entire novel? Already I can pick up echoes in the opening section, and sense that it will cast shadows over what is to follow, but can only guess what they will be. The War, I'm sure; Hollinghurst cannot change history. But will he take us there, or leap beyond it? Who will be killed, and who survive? Who will change, what philosophies or ways of life will disappear? And will there be a Stranger's Child? Again, how intriguing not to know, but to be poised on the brink of finding out!

======

Hollinghurst will begin Book Two in another place at another time. It takes a while to work out where we are and what has happened, even if we know the characters. It is a technique that he will use for each of the remaining four Books, tantalizing the reader's expectations with little mysteries, so that every new section brings a thrill of discovery and delight. Additionally, all but one of the five Books are centered around some kind of set-piece such as a house-party, dinner, celebration, or funeral, brilliantly handled in the best tradition. The exception is the penultimate book, painstaking and a little dry, but it contains the patient excavation of facts and opinions that will hold all the previous mysteries together, some of them not so little after all. For this is also a novel about biography, how the very facts of a life can change when seen from some remove, and how little in the end it will matter, as the corroborating details disappear into dust.

In addition to the novelists mentioned above, I found myself thinking increasingly of Angus Wilson, a writer mentioned several times in the novel. His Hemlock and After (1952), one of the first novels of gay life, made possible what Hollinghurst now takes for granted, and Wilson's theme of the rise and fall of reputations in his masterpiece, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), is echoed strongly here. But Hollinghurst does not share Wilson's slight air of stuffiness. He is the more colorful writer, more brightly lit, and though occasionally naughty, more intriguing. Looking back from the gray sobriety of end of the book, admittedly, the shimmering atmosphere of that first Edwardian summer now seems like a post-Impressionist mirage. But that is a necessary consequence of Hollinghurst's elegiac theme, and it is something of a miracle that he can sustain the interest so effectively for so long.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

In 2004 Alan Hollinghurst made literary headlines by winning the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Set in Thatcher’s 1980’s Britain it courted mild controversy with its depictions of cocaine abuse and graphic gay sex. Seven years later The Stranger’s Child made the Man Booker long list and then fell out of contention, which led to bitter complaints from those critics who believe that Hollinghurst is Britain’s greatest living writer.


I approached this book with optimism. I hadn’t read The Line of Beauty but I knew enough to realize that Hollinghust could be an interesting proposition. The novel begins just prior to WWI and finds the sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle reading poetry and awaiting the arrival of her older brother George and his university friend Cecil Valance - a poet from a wealthy family who also happens to be bisexual. Cecil’s impact over the course of his stay is significant; he upsets George’s mother, who suspects the truth of their relationship, causes a servant to marvel at his collection of silken underwear, frolics with George in the woods and flirts with Daphne. Most significantly he writes a poem, supposedly for Daphne, called “Two Acres”, after the name of the Sawles property. After his death in the war Cecil and his poem become immortalized when Winston Churchill quotes from “Two Acres” in a speech.


The events of this first section, just one of five, set the novel up for an exploration of mythmaking, the changing attitudes to homosexuality and the subjective nature of truth. Hollinghurst also devotes a great deal of space to the question of the moral ambiguity of biographers and their trade, particularly during the latter half of the book. Such a concentration of weighty themes seems more than enough to make the novel both entertaining and philosophically intriguing. Disappointingly The Stranger’s Child mostly fails in both regards, although it does have its moments.


The novel’s strengths lay in the way it depicts the evolution of British culture during the twentieth century and how it affected people’s lives. In this regard the scope of the novel is ambitious and does at least move the plot forward. The naiveté and pleasures of the pre war section give way to the bleak post war section, in which Daphne has married Cecil’s brother – Dudley, who is beset by mental problems due to his part in the war. Everyone suffers, including the children, Daphne and an old German woman who comes to an untimely end (a parody of Agatha Christie?). The third and most pleasing section, set in 1967, finds several gay characters, including the future Cecil biographer Paul Bryant, discussing the impending decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. By the novel’s close, set in 2008, everything’s changed and significantly the gay characters are marrying each other and can now live their lives in the open.


Despite the novel’s initial promise and Hollinghurst’s ambition I was quite often utterly bored with The Stranger's Child. Turgid is a good adjective to use. There is simply too much dialogue, with endless boring interactions between characters at parties and dinners. During these extended scenes the characters are regularly nervous to the point of being neurotic. Often they appear to be hamstrung by politeness and therefore never say what they really mean. Hollinghurst is probably making a point about what it is to be English or even human, but unfortunately it happens so often that you begin to tire of it and start to feel that way yourself.


With many of the major events taking place outside of the narrative the plot is stretched thin and therefore there is virtually no tension generated and no real desire to find out what may happen next, or to invest emotionally in the characters. The novel is also overwritten to the point of exhaustion. No character can speak without a description of their facial expression or how they are looking narrowly at another character or off into the middle distance. Hollinghurst’s writing is incredibly detailed, which is sometimes quite startlingly effective, but his obsession with the minutiae of everyday interactions does not make for riveting reading.




As a literary monument to the cultural history of Britain over much of the twentieth century The Stranger's Child succeeds to an extent, but it is ultimately hamstrung by its flaws. As with most books some readers respond well whilst others do not. A handful of my book club members absolutely loved this book, but most either marginally appreciated it or thought that it was too long and tedious. In the end The Stranger’s Child simply made me yearn for the succinct brilliance of Carson McCuller’s writing. Despite Hollinghurst’s fine reputation my advice is to approach this novel with caution, or perhaps not at all. It seems that the judges of the Man Booker prize were right after all.

[Gena · Rating 5 out of 5]

My enjoyment of the first two sections of this novel was tinged by the suspicion that I was merely indulging in some Merchant Ivory–caliber WWI-era nostalgia—a suspicion perhaps fed by my having read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the novel in the NYRB before reading the novel itself. In the end, however, the book comes through as a worthy offering from one of the best British novelists currently writing, although it didn't strike me with quite the force of The Line of Beauty.

Hollinghurst has been described as a social satirist, but this novel is more of a meditation on cultural memory and technologies of memorialization. In fact, it completely undermines whatever structures of nostalgia it seems to introduce early on by suggesting repeatedly and unrelentingly that all of our monuments to notions of "past greatness"—whether actual monuments, or written remembrances, or just casually fond memories—are at heart distorted reproductions of previous generations' trite crap. The nature of the distortion varies wildly, some of it politically or psychologically motivated, some of it conventional, some of it just the formal reality of how memory works, but what is consistent in Hollinghurst's vision is the diminishing return of the memorialized object itself as various kinds of cultural work go into preserving it.

Cecil Valance, the novel's primary object of memory, is an aristocratic poet who dies young in the Great War, crossing over into an unlikely, extended cultural afterlife fed by generational waves of investment: upper-class self-preservational strategies (the gaudy marble tomb in the estate's chapel), the tabloid appeal of high-society memoirs, various academic projects ranging from annotated collections of letters to "recuperative" queer biographies. No mode of remembering Cecil, from his mother's desperate seances in the library to his biographer's earnest attempts to decode his cryptic sex life, is allowed to be any more accurate or less absurd than any other. This is largely because Cecil himself, whom we meet in Part 1, is (as mediated by the novel itself, and not the 20th-century it represents) hardly worth remembering—a young man more charisma than substance, who dabbled, with all the arrogance and flightiness of a young nobleman, in flirtation, seduction, and poetry, all to little consequence. (The one remembrance of Cecil that comes to the fore as perhaps more apt than all the rest is his senile former (secret) lover's bright exclamation, during an interview with a biographer, that "he had an enormous cock.")

Ultimately, the novel risks a kind of cynical hollowness as it leaves one wondering whether anything is worth remembering at all. No form of memory prevails over any other—paper documents are as fallible as iPhone text messages in preserving personalities and relationships, which aren't very interesting to begin with; great houses are ugly and uncomfortable in their prime, and become only more so through "improvement" or decay; literary and academic homages are revealed to be equally misguided both in their choices of object and the significance they assign to themselves as keepers of those objects. What we call cultural inheritance—or, more colloquially, just "history" or "the past"—is exposed a a sad accumulation of things made to bear more weight than they can with any real dignity. This sense is captured in a description of the house one of the characters lives in as an old woman, from the perspective of a younger visitor: "All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines." The "worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent" is the novel's predominant impression.

At the very end, though, I wondered if the novel was offering a kind of lifeline in the face of its own cynicism: a small collection of amusingly bad letters marginal to the Cecil Valance narrative emerges, documenting in a surprisingly moving way the awkward, illiterate maneuvers of a more thoroughly forgettable young man as he tries to avoid the sexual advances of an older neighbor without violating the laws of gratitude and bonhomie governing upper-class homosocial propriety. Though there is some suggestion that this document, too, can and will be put to the same absurd uses as any other bit of cultural detritus, for a moment it does seem paradoxically to capture something not ridiculous—evidence of the beauty of humanity flaring up unexpectedly in the most unlikely of specimens.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I finished this novel, I just sat for five minutes, thinking of where this story had taken me in past week. This was long-listed for the 2011 Booker Prize, and why it didn’t get on the short list and then win, I won’t know. (But I may, next up is the winner, “The Sense of a Ending.”) Hollinghurst has won the award before, but his latest effort is an incredible story of love, loyalty, and the art of poetry (and much, much more). And it has ended at the top of my 2011 Best Of list just in the nick of time!

When it began, I felt like it was a mashup between two of my favorites, “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited.” That soon changed. It begins in 1913, pre-World War I and ends in 2008, when people are using iPhones and civil partnerships are legal in England. Throughout the five sections, skipping decades, the one person that is constant is the poet Cecil Valance.

Hollinghurst has a writer’s technique (and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this before), of plopping his reader into the new part (scene) each time. I had to keep a small piece of paper with me to identify who is who; while we had met most of these people before, everyone is older, names have changed due to marriage, etc. I felt like a detective, “aha, that was little Corrina!” as he gradually re-introduced these characters to his readers. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well, but I frequently wondered how he was going to tie the current story to the previous section and he always made it work. Bravo! And of course, halfway through, the armchair psychologist in me wondered, who IS the stranger’s child? Who is the stranger? Who is the child? The answer may be in Part 5, but do we ever really know?

Hollinghurst was a new author to me; actually, I’ve never even heard of him, but I can’t wait to read his other books, one in particular that has come highly recommended. This winter, if you want to get totally engrossed in a story that captivates and takes you away from your life for just a little while, this is just the book!

[Alistair · Rating 1 out of 5]

one can't necessarily blame an author for the blurb that his publisher writes on the inside leaf but when I read that " his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste , class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose " , I felt decidedly queasy .
Unfortunately this sort of pretentious sickly marshmallow prose is typical of how Hollinghurst writes as well .
I am confused as to why whilst other cultural forms such as music ,art architecture etc seem to progress , experiment and develop , the English literary establishment seems to produce this sort of staid unoriginal novel . It is really not much more than Downton Abbey for supposedly high brow readers , a sort of costume drama writing . But at least Downton Abbey knows it is a bit of trashy Sunday evening lite viewing whilst The Stanger's Child takes itself so seriously as " literature " .
I will quote at random " his feelings absorbed him so completley that he seemd to float towards them , weak with excitement , across a purely symbolic landscape " . Anyone on a weekend writing course would be ashamed of this .
A one star rating is meant to mean " didn't like it " . My one star rating means I hated it .
I really like Henry James and his complex intricate writing to which Hollinghurst has been compared but this up its own arse novel will I am sure be forgotten very quickly after the marketing hype has died down .
I have just read that the writer was awarded a university degree in Master of Literature and subsequently was the deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement . That explains a lot . Whatever happened to writers starving in garrets , suffering for their art , being at odds with society and dying penniless . Nowadays they give readings at smug self promoting book festivals .