The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst's new novel begins in 1913, when George, a Cambridge undergraduate, brings the aristocratic and poetic Cecil Valance to stay at Two Acres, his mother's suburban villa near Harrow, sending the inhabitants into a tizzy.

There are readings of Tennyson and camp gigglings beyond the rockery. Normal strictures are relaxed; Cecil's cigar smoke penetrates the modest house together with the pervasive sense of his superior worldliness, caste and accomplishments which supply the themes of his verse and conversation.

Cecil arrives as George's lover but before he leaves he manages also to make naughty advances to George's little sister, Daphne; and it is in her autograph album that he leaves a poem called Two Acres. Reading it the next morning, after Cecil has taken his train, Daphne "knew it was the most precious thing she'd ever been given, and even then she had felt it being taken away".

The backward-looking tenses of this sentence give us the first glimpse into a future where everything is changed. Hollinghurst, with his perfect pitch for such evaluations, has cast Valance as one of literary history's natural marginalia. Here is a Rupert Brooke-alike with a poetic talent as nostalgic and overblown as the turreted Victorian pile he stands to inherit, which would look rather small if it ever came detached from his personal charms. In the normal run of things it would hardly have triumphed over the depredations of time. But instead of oblivion, the war comes, Cecil is killed by a German sniper and he and his poetry are transfigured into emblems of what England lost, to be "read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things " as one character falteringly finds it. Now everyone in his life has to adjust, with varying degrees of resentment and pleasure, to an unexpected outcome: their connection with Cecil has suddenly become the most interesting thing about them.

The book is conceived in five episodes set in, respectively, 1913, 1926, 1967, 1977 and 2008. Or so I think. These dates may be wrong because in each instance we are thrust into the middle of new scenes and have to grope our way among unexplained names and occurrences, straining to discover key relationships like a weekend guest who has missed the introductions.

At the start of the second episode, we find Daphne living at Corley Court (the Valance seat) but not what year it is, why she's there, who she's married to, whose are the children. We are in the half-dark, where so much of this novel takes place. And even now, as we are feeling our way into the new present, we bump across characters who are themselves groping for a purchase on events. The biographers have already arrived and are groping in the other direction to determine what happened in Cecil's short life. "I shall comb The Marlburian with much keenness" confides one who has descended on Corley Court for a Cecil memorial occasion. Only 10 years after Cecil's death he has begun to generate a small industry in matters of print, memoir and life-writing.

At the hub of this activity is the weekend at Two Acres where the book began. As the 20th century unfolds, with its (now moribund) enthusiasm for literary biography, interest in Cecil swells like a star on the verge of implosion. The ageing few who actually knew him take up positions to control the information, hiding letters, writing up their recollections. His surviving brother, Dudley, a post-war modernist whose first instinct is to mock Cecil's Georgian postures, tries to subsume Cecil into a memoir and then finds he has become an official Cecil-relic, greeted with reverence in old age by the Master of Balliol, but only for the connection. Meanwhile, a bright young spark called Bryant, a type of late 20th-century biographer whom the likes of Cecil enabled to thrive, tries hilariously to kindle a little late light from the dried-up sources. Names, of course, are one of Hollinghurst's strong points. We learn something when we recall that a Valance is both a frill and a bed-curtain.

This subject - of memory and memorial, and the fates of the keepers of the flame - has been done before, and well, as the author acknowledges. But it may never have been done as amusingly.

Moreover, Hollinghurst's genius for literary pastiche is so developed that his invented productions - Cecil's poems, Dudley and Daphne's memoirs - aren't just note-perfect exercises in wit and accidental self-exposure, they're actually quite accomplished on their own terms. I feel this is difficult and generous; and that this forgiveness, this capacity for tenderness, is the greatest of Hollinghurst's many novelistic gifts.

It's easy for a novelist to sneer at his own creations: they have no surprises in store. Here, though, we marvel at the effort of imaginative sympathy that makes his characters inhabit the moment. He is particularly alert with the old, and mothers.

Fans of Hollinghurst's former works may be sad to find there is little explicit sex to be had here.

Cecil's "celebrated membrum virile" remains "unguessed forever beneath his marble tunic" to visitors to his tomb as well as to the reader, which is something of a new departure. Instead, Hollinghurst deploys Cecil's cigar case in a conscious tribute to the sorts of phallic substitutions available to Victorian writers, such as Wilde and George Eliot, whom Cecil himself would have read. As that suggests, The Stranger's Child is saturated in books and bookishness. A reader so minded can go through every scene marking off the references: Maud, The Egoist, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, A Handful of Dust, Mansfield Park, The Aspern Papers, Almost Anything by E M Forster. Whether this can be ignored at will is another matter. I suspect not, but everyone will have to decide whether it feels like distraction or enrichment.