Beginning just before the Great War and ending close to the present, the narrative is constructed as a series of ensemble pieces whose interest centres on the relationships between two families: the Valances of Corley Hall, nouveau landed gentry, and the Sawles, a middle-class family whose house ‘Two Acres’ provides the title for a poem written by the poet Cecil Valance as a curiously ambiguous gift to the sixteen-year-old Daphne, sister of Valance’s Cambridge friend George Sawle. The poem is written by Cecil in Daphne’s autograph book, but its true dedicatee would seem to be her brother, his lover and fellow Apostle. The weekend at ‘Two Acres’ is troubling for the Sawles, and for at least one of their servants (the octogenarian George observes to Cecil’s biographer ‘C would fuck anyone’). These pre-war gropings and couplings are the stuff of country-house comedy of manners (Hollinghurst has a fine talent for this), but Cecil’s impact is immeasurably stronger; the novel goes on to explore, in a variety of moods and registers, the effect of ‘Cecil Valance’ on the emotional and intellectual lives of people who had no personal knowledge of him. The limpid Georgian poet acquires, like his real-life Apostle rival Rupert Brooke, a paradoxical posthumous lustre as ‘the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness’, because his works are read by generations of schoolchildren. Cecil’s brief life is the point of departure for the novel’s often incisive and always intelligent variations on the theme of ‘Speak, Memory’.

Memory – or the attempt to memorialise, and its concomitant attempt to find a self-image in the act of recall – is the link between the five sections of The Stranger’s Child. Its most obvious early manifestations in the novel are architecture and sculpture, in the shape of Corley Hall, Victorian Gothic monument to an obscure family’s rise in the world as the result of shifts in the agrarian economy, and then in Corley’s Valance tomb, where ‘beautiful Cecil’ is reconstructed as the desexualised icon of the classical soldier/scholar/gentleman. Of greater interest, however, is the heavily literary décor. The majority of its characters, with Cecil leading the band, are biographers (would-be and actual), memoirists, editors, reviewers, historians, or book-collectors – united only by their interest in preserving their own, usually self-interested, views about a past and present to which outmoded Valance effusions such as ‘Two Acres’ are curiously central. ‘The stranger’s child’ is a quotation from the poem; it seems to denote not only the ‘child’ Daphne Sawle, but also anyone who is compelled to visit the past. Her consciousness provides the book with most of its emotional depth, and her reflection on Cecil’s parasitic biographer Paul Bryant resonates throughout the novel: ‘He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.’

The near-century time span enables Hollinghurst to explore that indeterminacy of identity which is the other side to the novel’s exploration of the falsifying nature of memory, even when memory strives for historical truth. Just as written testimony is suppressed, destroyed, and subjected to the distortions of those who have access to it, so too is ‘character’ seen to change over time. There is a powerful kaleidoscopic impulse at work here, as figures from an earlier time are seen from new perspectives. The bizarre Sir Dudley Valance (Cecil’s brother and Daphne’s first husband) comes to be seen as someone much more disturbing than the stereotype aristocrat he seems at first to be, a figure whose emotional and sexual nature has been fatally warped by his never-stated experience of loss. In a less sinister vein, the naïve boy servant Jonah reappears as a wily eighty-one-year-old who has a sexual history (Cecil again!) that is documented but never to be revealed. And what of Cecil himself, he of the limp lyrics and the prodigious membrum virile? He is ultimately unknowable, despite the generations of writerly effort devoted to his memory. Hollinghurst’s is an art of multiple perspectives – not always successful, but capable of arresting effects when applied, for example, to the drawing of Daphne Sawle and the biographer nemesis Paul Bryant, devoted to entering a world denied to him by his class origins. (Bryant, pathetic but ultimately a success in his own terms, might have strayed in from the pages of David Lodge; with his malfunctioning tape recorder and neurotic self-regard, he is a cautionary example to any aspiring biographer.)

The novel continues The Line of Beauty’s satirical exploration of class consciousness, although here it is fascinating to see that its ‘upper’ characters have questionable pedigrees; James Lees-Milne would surely have raised a haughty eyebrow at the Valances and their family seat, which has become a minor prep school by the 1960s. There is some sharp observation of trends in English society, as the inhabitants of Corley sink into middle-class occupations – the baronet’s daughter (or is she?) marries a bank manager and becomes a music teacher – while never losing their assumptions of superiority. The inhabitants of this insistently literary society are a close-knit, even incestuous, lot, and this provides much of the novel’s satirical bite. A campy Times Literary Supplement reviewer explains to Cecil’s biographer: ‘Daphne’s second husband’s half-sister married my father’s elder brother …’  The gay men (is there an unambiguously straight man in this book?) are a particularly caste-conscious set, though it is encouraging to see that by the book’s 2007 section there are some interracial ‘civils’ at the (Reform?) Club assembly.

Hollinghurst ‘does’ the body very well indeed – there is some splendidly raunchy gay sex, and some powerful evocation (focused on the needy biographer) of what it is like to be less than charismatic. His most appealing characters are women, whose sexual lives are in different ways suppressed or curtailed – the secretive, astringent Daphne Sawle, her submissive mother Freda, and her daughter Corinna. The Sawle women are the keepers of secrets, the protectors, the maintainers of the civilised social façade. The derring-do of that 1913 weekend in Middlesex acquires darker implications by the 1920s sequence, which shows Freda as captive to Cecil’s letters to her son and daughter. (Neither we nor the biographer within the story ever get to read them.)

For all the questions it raises about the status of memory and the fluidity of identity, The Stranger’s Child works best as comedy and satire. These effects, not surprisingly in a book where writers and texts are centre-stage, are self-consciously literary. Historically famous figures – Tennyson, Lytton Strachey, Rupert Brooke, Lord Berners, Churchill, Frances Partridge – rub shoulders with lesser lights belonging to the present fiction. Contemporary biographers and literary critics get similar treatment – Jon Stallworthy and Paul Fussell attend, along with Sir Dudley Valance, a conference at Balliol, and there is a reference to Michael Holroyd. Cecil Valance’s work crosses over into historical reality, by way of a musical setting by Sir Arthur Bliss and his inclusion in A.P. (Lord) Wavell’s famous anthology Other Men’s Flowers. Unfortunately, these effects too readily tip over into their own cleverness. There is nothing here to rival that brilliantly camp scene in The Line of Beauty in which a mesmerising Mrs Thatcher gets up to dance with a precocious cocaine-snorter.

Although there is a kind of structural appropriateness in a conclusion which revisits the Harrow of 1913 – the houses of the Sawle circle have now made way for ‘executive residences’ – the book ends with a bit of a whimper. Of course, a writer of Hollinghurst’s stature is entitled to challenge the old Creative Writing 101 warning about limiting the entry of new characters towards the end of a novel, but the return to the shadow-world of Edwardian male love and friendship doesn’t compensate for a torrent of gossipy chat. The analytical gaze wavers. Like A.S. Byatt, Alan Hollinghurst has a well-deserved reputation for penetrating, polished, and scrupulously researched writing, but some fearless editing might have made even better novels of both The Stranger’s Child and The Children’s Book.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011