The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst review
Alan Hollinghurst's new novel is undoubtedly one of the best this year
With his balance of surface glitter and steely precision, irony and deep seriousness, Alan Hollinghurst is usually seen as an heir to Henry James. But he must also have had, at some crucial formative moment, a passionate infatuation with Brideshead Revisited (a book that the narrator of his first novel describes as "deplorable"). His characters evince a recurring fixation with nice houses and their glamorous, sexy inhabitants: most notably, in the case of Nick Guest, the vaguely creepy interloper who moves into the home of a Tory MP in his Booker-winning masterpiece The Line of Beauty; but Waugh's theme and his pastoral imagery echo through all of Hollinghurst's work. Charles Ryder's words could apply to most of his protagonists: ". . . I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city."
Of course Hollinghurst's enchanted garden is quite unlike any other seen in English literature: gay sex pastoral, it might be called, whether the unapologetically explicit action takes place in gated Notting Hill gardens, London clubs or the summery English countryside. His captivating new book his first since The Line of Beauty seven years ago is a country house novel that begins in a garden, in the late summer of 1913. In an inversion of the Brideshead theme, the outsider, the stranger's child, is an aristocrat visiting a middle-class home and seducing the family in it the Sawles of Two Acres, a pleasant Victorian villa in Stanmore Hill, in the outer suburbs of London. (Later on, the Sawles invade his! much gr ander home and repay the favour.)
He is Cecil Valance, a mediocre Georgian poet of broad sexual tastes, who, in the course of his short visit, drinks too much, stays up all night, worships the dawn, repeatedly ravishes the love-struck younger son of the house (his Cambridge friend George), roughly kisses the daughter Daphne by the rockery, and then writes a poem praising these "Two blessed acres of English ground". When Cecil dies during the war, the poem is extolled by Churchill, as Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" was, and becomes famous as an evocation of a country on the brink of a great change: "A first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many great masters," as one character puts it.
The rest of the novel consists of four more sections, set at intervals between 1926 and 2008, while most of the action deaths, marriages, births occurs offstage, in the gaps in between. In the second episode, Daphne has married Cecil's "mad brute" of a brother and is now the mistress of the Valance seat, Corley Court, "a violently Victorian" country house in Berkshire. At the behest of her forbidding mother-in-law, known as "the General", she hosts a weekend devoted to Cecil's memory. In the third, set in 1967, Corley Court has been turned into a prep school; Paul Bryant, a bookish young bank clerk in Foxleigh, the local town, meets Daphne, and has his first love affair, with Peter Rowe, a teacher at the school. In the fourth, we see Paul, now a literary biographer, interviewing the survivors from the first section for his biography of Cecil. The book ends with a coda set in 2008.
The story is a sort of ironic meditation on the evolution of literary memory. It shows how the poem and the original incident behind it are mythologised, and the myth is made official. Later comes the revisionist version: the characters discover over the years what the reader already knows, that the famous poem was probably written for a man rather than a woman, and that ! there ar e lost, unpublished sections which would have shocked the wider reading public: "The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes . . ." The myths are partially corrected, but new myths replace some of the old ones, and new fashions unbalance the historical record just as the old ones did. When a friend asks Daphne what Paul wanted to interview her about, she says, with some justice: "Smut, essentially."
Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. He offers surely the best available example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards. Where so many fiction writers seem stylish but austere, or full of life but messy, Hollinghurst has his cake and eats it. His novels cover high life and low life, culture and instinct, jokes and opera, with equal confidence. He can follow the consciousness of an individual in amazing detail, as well as subtly dramatising the wider social and historical currents: The Line of Beauty is one of the definitive novels about the 1980s, and his debut, The Swimming Pool Library, is a sort of fictional excavation of London's gay past. His best books are beautiful at the level of the sentence and impressive at the levels of character, incident and plot; they manage to be nearly perfect and great fun at the same time.
In many ways, The Stranger's Child has the same qualities as his previous novels. It is elegant, seductive and extremely enjoyable to read, and peppered with astute, apparently casual noticings. (Of a man stumbling around in a shed at a party: "He was drunk, it was one of the hilarious uncorrectable disasters of being drunk." Of a grand literary wife: "A hard, good-looking face, thoroughly made up, and a manner he knew at once, from its tight smiles and frowns, of getting people to do things.") It treads muc! h of the same ground as its predecessors: class and money, buried histories of gay life in this country, the dreary provinces and the exciting metropolis, with forays into architecture and Victoriana. As ever, Hollinghurst's set-piece parties are stunning.
But he appears to have taken two vows of chastity. The first, which some readers may find shocking, is that he has radically cut down on the sex, which is mostly shielded by soft focus or euphemism ("a bit of Oxford style"); emotional rather than physical love dominates. The second is that he has limited the use of his gorgeous observational voice, which dominated his previous works. A lot of the narrative is carried by dialogue and relatively basic description. It also has a principal female character, for the first time, and the story is warmer and more forgiving than in the past.
It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he's not very interested in women; that there's too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable. These objections, incidentally, seem to me largely philistine or dishonest (the old cultured pretence that sex is "boring" and beneath one's notice). And, flawlessly executed though this book is, it has rather less bite than its predecessors. The Stranger's Child is stately, even a touch tweedy, and not exactly original. Where his other novels seem to stand alone, this is a more recognisable creation, pastiching the classic styles of the past, and retooling them to reflect present-day concerns, as Ian McEwan did in Atonement and Sarah Waters has done throughout her career, to name only two of his contemporaries. At different points there are flashes of Forster, Woolf, Waugh, Lytton Strachey's letters, The Go-Between, The Aspern Papers, possibly Robert Graves, obviously Rupert Brooke though Cecil is not exactly based on him and doubtless many others for reference-spotters.
The first world war, Bloomsbur! y, the E dwardian gentry enjoying a last glorious summer the terrain is familiar, as the book frequently acknowledges. But the main objection is that the pastiche partially obscures the voice. Even The Spell, his evocation of an early middle-aged man's infatuation with clubbing, ecstasy and younger men, which many see as slightly embarrassing, has more inspired and memorable passages. And the new book certainly falls somewhat short of Hollinghurst's best work The Swimming Pool Library, The Folding Star and The Line of Beauty. Unlike them, it's merely very good: it doesn't leave you dazed, page after page, with the brilliance, wit and subtlety of its perceptions. Is this an ungrateful line of criticism? Probably: The Stranger's Child will no doubt be one of the best novels published this year.
See interview with Alan Hollinghurst on Saturday 18 June., 18 June 2011.
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