The Stranger’s Child
by Alan Hollinghurst
Alfred A. Knopf. 464 pages, $27.95
BY THE TIME you’ve read the fifth novel by any writer, you begin to see his work in a way you could not with the first, which is where we stand now with Alan Hollinghurst, whose new book people have been waiting for since his last, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. (The Stranger’s Child has also been nominated for the Booker.) Although Hollinghurst said, after winning the Booker, that his next book would be a collection of short stories, what The Stranger’s Child does, in nearly five hundred pages, is to confirm that he is a writer who revels in the long form.
This time he even seems to re-invent the form. The Stranger’s Child has an exceedingly clever structure; it’s essentially five big set pieces, separated by time and history, that take us from 1913 to the present. We begin with the visit that Cecil Valance, an aristocratic young poet, makes on the cusp of World War I to the middle-class home of George Sawle, his Oxford classmate (and boyfriend), and end almost a hundred years later with Rob, a young book dealer in London, tracking down clues to Valance’s life in a depressing London suburb, while making a date on his smartphone.
The Stranger’s Child is both an up-to-date narrative and one of those old-fashioned family sagas—with a gay twist, though here the main character is a woman named Daphne Sawle. It starts in 1913 and takes us through the post-war era of the Bright Young Things, through the 60’s, up to a London in which gay men can refer to their partners as husbands. All this is very entertaining. Reading The Stranger’s Child is like watching a movie. A lot of the book is dialogue, and the dialogue is bright and usually cutting. “I’m glad that Clara was persuaded to come,” says Daphne of the frumpy German woman Daphne’s mother has brought along on a visit to Corley Court. “It will mean so much to her. Poor dear, you know she hasn’t even got electricity.”
Hollinghurst brings to life with enormous skill séances, dinner parties, walks in the woods, children’s theatricals, memorial services, interviews, a weekend in a great house. Something may happen in these set pieces that advances the plot, but mostly they seem their own excuse for being. Henry James’ “scenic method” was rather schematic: something is dramatized, then the characters ruminate about what that scene meant, repeat. In The Stranger’s Child, we don’t get much meditation—though the two chapters in which we do (Daphne’s mother at Corley Court, Daphne in old age) are so satisfying, one wishes there had been more interiority.
People are not given much to reflection in The Stranger’s Child—the entrances and exits, the hypocrisies of social life, are the thing. Here’s Daphne wondering how to address a letter:
“D,” she wrote, and hesitated, with her nib on the paper. Not Darling, so “Dear” certainly, and then another pause, which threatened to turn into a blot, before she added “est”: “Dearest Revel” … One went up and down the scale with people—certainly among their set there were startling advances in closeness, which sometimes were followed by coolings just as abrupt … what one really needed was a scale below “Dear,” since often one had no time whatever for the person one was warmly embracing on the page:
“Untrustworthy Jessica,” “Detestable Mr Carlton-Brown.”
What the constant wit is targeting may mystify at first. But soon enough one realizes that The Stranger’s Child is a satire on literary biography: the way a poet’s legacy is fought over by the survivors. On its long way to making this point, however, The Stranger’s Child is so steeped in modern English literature that its real pleasure may just be the dazzling virtuosity of the pastiche. This is not just a book about books, it’s a book made of books. The first part of the novel reads like E. M. Forster—England’s most famous closet case. (What else is Clara Kalbeck, the woman with no electricity, doing there except to echo the Schlegel sisters in Howards End?) The last part is Evelyn Waugh. It’s as if two dozen novels and films set in English country houses had been put into a Cuisinart; all that’s been left out is Winnie the Pooh—and you could argue that. This is a book that feasts not with panthers but with clichés. Whether American readers will react differently than English ones, I don’t know. But this mash-up of Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Atonement, The Go-Between, Howards End, Maurice, et al., is a very English lament for a culture destroyed by World War I, and its descent into a so much dingier present.
The plot seems to have been inspired by historical fact: The poet Rupert Brooke (“I have been so great a lover”) had an admirer who served as Winston Churchill’s secretary, and when Churchill quoted a poem by Brooke (who died of an infected mosquito bite on his way to Gallipoli), the beautiful young poet became the symbol of an entire generation. Hollinghurst’s hero, Cecil Valance, is remembered in the same way after dying in World War I, for a poem memorized by English school children—even if, somebody cracks, Valance is only “a first-rate example of the second-rate poet.”
How first- or second-rate one may judge for oneself, since The Stranger’s Child is laced with excerpts from Valance’s work that cleverly echo the conventions of Georgian poetry—though the book’s title (with its implication of a gothic mystery) is taken from a Victorian poem by Tennyson—an earlier source of the plot, you could argue, since Tennyson’s life was also changed when his classmate, Arthur Hallam (another gilded youth who died young), visited his family, and Hallam fell in love with Tennyson’s sister. Indeed, the more one thinks about it, it’s Tennyson, already mourning a lost England in the 1800’s, who lies behind this book.
The melancholy note, however, is always wrapped in comedy in Hollinghurst. The attempt to keep Cecil Valance in the closet devolves into a depressing farce when Cecil’s boyfriend George confronts Cecil’s marble effigy in the chapel at his ancestral home, Corley Court. Not only does George find the hands too small—we know what that means—but one significant item is not represented at all: “the celebrated membrum virile, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert. … How Cecil went on about it, pompously and responsibly—it might have been the Magna Carta from the way he talked about it.” But times change, and when George talks, years later, to Cecil’s second biographer, he puts it this way: “He had an enormous cock … and would fuck anyone.” The subject of The Stranger’s Child is the opening of the closet: “the English idyll” that, George thinks, “had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes.”
In this book nothing is explained; characters come on stage, disappear, then reappear as minor figures at different points in time, in a tour de force of stagecraft—though this big a cast of characters may please some readers and alienate others, just as some may find the cumulative effect of this book immensely sad and others simply misanthropic. In The Line of Beauty there’s an American journalist nicknamed “The Mordant Observer.” The same nickname could be applied to the narrator of The Stranger’s Child, who recounts everyone’s—mostly bad—behavior with the tight-lipped reserve and professional suavity of a bank manager in some small provincial town (where part of this book takes place). Paul Bryant, the man who will one day be Cecil Valance’s biographer but who at the outset is merely a bank clerk cashing checks, feels weird that he knows so much about the secret overdrafts of the people who come to his window. In the same way, Hollinghurst knows everything about his characters but retains a cool, non-committal, understated tone while describing their folly—the Mordant Observer, in spades.
Even architecture is subject to this vision—architecture is always important in Hollinghurst, and in this novel, where the ground is constantly crumbling beneath our feet, our first sense of decline comes when Cecil Valance’s surviving brother Dudley decides to redecorate Corley Court in a modern style that will mask, like the satire of this book, its Victorian gravity. Here Daphne is described with a tenderness that Hollinghurst withholds from her most of the time:
She took her letter into the hall, and stood for a moment by the massive oak table in the middle of the room. It seemed to her suddenly the emblem and essence of Corley. The children tore around it, the dog got under it, the housemaids polished it and polished it, like votaries of a cult. Functionless, unwieldy, an obstacle to anyone who crossed the room, the table had a firm place in Daphne’s happiness, from which she feared it was about to be prised by force. She saw again how imposing the hall was, with its gloomy paneling and Gothic windows, in which the Valance coat of arms was repeated insistently. Would those perhaps be allowed to stay?
Not in this book, and that’s the point. If one wanted to show that biography is “the falsest of the arts,” one might just as well have made this point in an essay. But there is way too much going on in The Stranger’s Child for it to be just that. So many of its best moments seem to have nothing to do with the ostensible theme. The most memorable characters in this book are often the most minor. The most sympathetic may well be a little boy named Wilfrid wandering through his irascible father’s ancestral home—though why we need to be in little Wilfrid’s head at all isn’t really clear. There are so many characters in The Stranger’s Child, it’s like one of those Mexican murals in which dozens of characters portray history. But there’s a curious disjunction between the theme and the set pieces. The heart and plot of the book are not quite in synch. Reading it one often wonders why we are witnessing what we are witnessing; we go along for the ride because it’s so entertaining, so precisely written, and so funny. But eventually one wonders: What is this book about?
The Stranger’s Child is dedicated to the memory of Mick Imlah, a friend of Hollinghurst’s who died young; and the last section takes as its epigraph a line from a poem Imlah wrote called “In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson”—to wit: “Nobody remembers you at all.” That’s it, really: a bitter theme for a book as funny as this one—but that’s how it feels watching the final conflagration destroying whatever may be left of Cecil Valance in a suburban back yard. In the end, the oblivion that the Sawleses and the Valances and their homes amounts to is a kind of ugly and absurd banality.
This is a theme larger than the unreliability of biography, or even the closet in English literature—and it’s what makes the box to which novels with gay subject matter are consigned even more unfair in the case of a writer as brilliant (and saturated in English literature) as this one. The Swimming Pool Library (1988) earned great praise for its tour of the sexual underside, the toilets and parks, of gay London, but when Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell (1998), dealt with relationships among a set of club-going, Ecstasy-taking men, it was attacked by critics for being, well, too gay—most notoriously, in a New Yorker review by John Updike that said Hollinghurst had described a world from which “most human beings are excluded” and in which “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” And while Hollinghurst’s next book, The Line of Beauty (2005), answered his critics by being set in a totally heterosexual context—the house of a Tory family in the Thatcher years—it too portrayed a great deal of the bleaker side of gay life, including AIDS. Now, with The Stranger’s Child, Hollinghurst has played a card more English than gay, not only choosing a female protagonist but portraying, albeit offstage, a century of English history. Yet the book is just as “gay” as the others, even if, this time, the descriptions of sex have given way to a more intellectual topic: the literary closet. There may be more women, children, and straight characters here, but running through it all is still the subterranean world that Updike found so foreign.
What holds all these books together in the end, however, is not the gay subject but the theme of loss, the mutability of things. The Spell was about the transience of a trance (sexual desire). What lingers after reading The Stranger’s Child is the pathos of decline, the shambling, broken-down old people whom the characters we meet at the start turn into, along with the houses in which they lived—Corley Court, Two Acres, and Mattocks. These places, along with their original inhabitants, not only cease to be private but end up buried in the suburban sprawl, the ugliness, of modern London—altered and subdivided and rewired to make money off people who are merely passing through. Nothing survives—not even the house of the man who had a crush on Daphne’s brother when they were young, which makes an appearance at the very end simply to underscore the devastation of the world in which this novel began. Here is how Hollinghurst describes the book’s last character, a young book dealer in search of the Valance papers, entering the house of Daphne’s childhood neighbor:
Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp—then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in—the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off.
The Stranger’s Child runs mostly on a sort of shallow, nervous, theatrical glitter (which may be why one friend compared it to Middlemarch and another to The Yellow Rolls Royce) but what it is not fueled by—and what seems absent in much of Hollinghurst—is emotion … until we come to the end. And then the bitter reproach that nothing lasts is precisely that of the stanzas of “In Memoriam” from which the book’s title is taken.
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
