The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and now longlitsed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

It is the late summer of the last year before the first Great War. Cecil Valance, a beautiful young aristocratic poet, is visiting Two Acres, the home of his Cambridge friend and lover, George Sawle. On his departure, Cecil leaves a poem, dedicated to George's younger sister Daphne, which when published becomes a touchstone for a generation, symbolizing an England in its final glory. Meanwhile Daphne has also become involved with Cecil's family, visiting their Victorian Gothic country house, Corley, and developing a relationship with Cecil's brooding, manipulative brother, Dudley, that will link the families for ever.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty.

Reviews by members of our Uncorrected Proof Book Club

Review #1 by Meaghan Dew, Glen Iris, VIC

It’s 1913, and Cecil Valance is visiting the home of friend and fellow student George Sawle. Heir to a small fortune, he spends the weekend stripping off with George, turning his younger sister Daphne’s head, and writing poetry. He’s good looking, a bit arrogant, and when he goes he leaves a poem - scribbled in sixteen-year old Daphne’s autograph book.

Years later he’s considered one of the finest English poets of his time – destined to be quoted, studied, idolized and examined by family members and strangers alike for more than a century after his death. The uneventful weekend at Two Acres is the first of a series of windows into fictional poet Cecil Valance’s legacy. Becoming attached to any one character is inadvisable – after a quick glimpse into each life the story moves on, sometimes decades ahead, and the reader’s left to guess at the path their lives have taken through varied rumours, hearsay and the personal prejudices of the next narrator. People understood for a chapter are often unrecognizable by the time they appear again.

Though sometimes frustrating, this seems designed to mirror the way these characters are themselves rewriting history. Whether fans, family members or researchers they’re linked by their constant (and sometimes contradictory) reworking of Cecil Valance’s life and work.

Alan Hollinghurst is loved for his use of language rather than his gripping plots, and in that sense his latest is true to type. While at first the dialogue is almost distractingly upper-crust British it improves as the book nears the present day, and reads well over all. While readers motivated solely by a desire to know what happens next may find A Stranger’s Child disjointed and disappointing, it’s still worth reading for what it is – a clever, well-written take on how who we are affects the way we interpret the past - and the inevitable inaccuracy this causes in any work that reflects on it.

Review #2 by Amy Roil, Cape Paterson, VIC

It’s 1913. George Sawle and Cecil Valance are Cambridge pals, the former shabbily well to do, the latter shamelessly rich. George brings Cecil home to “Two Acres” where his charisma and reputation as a poet make quite the impression, especially on Daphne, George’s younger sister.

Fast-forward 12 years and Daphne is married to Cecil’s brother Dudley, and residing at the much-coveted Valance family home. Cecil has been killed at the 1916 Battle of the Somme and lies entombed at Corley Court. His poem, “Two Acres” which he wrote to Daphne all those years ago has captured England’s imagination, and his personal allure continues to haunt those close to him and others fascinated by his poetry and sordid love life.

Cecil’s sexuality permeates the novel, and desire hangs heavy. Alan Hollinghurst is excellent at taking a banal occasion such as a family dinner and imbuing it with awkward anticipation. Daphne’s expectation, George and Cecil’s thinly disguised lust for one another and Dudley’s contempt for his wife are all relayed via witty, atmospheric dialogue. Then, just as things get juicy, the novel jumps ahead a decade or two, leaving us thwarted, and forced to clumsily fill in the blanks by way of Paul Bryant, Cecil’s controversial biographer.

It’s a clever way of invoking gossip and conjecture and Hollinghurst constantly keeps us guessing. Who were Cecil’s true lovers? Are Daphne’s children the product of extra-marital affairs? Daphne is the centre of it all, and we’re left hanging on her every word, hoping she’ll reveal more. Alas, there’s too little from her and far too much from the parasitic Paul, who feeds on Valance family scandal. Paul’s captivation with Cecil begins when he visits his tomb at Corley Court, now a public school, while on a date with teacher Peter Rowe.

The spoliation of the English Country House and the decay of the upper classes are themes plucked straight from Brideshead Revisited. Hollinghurst overtly pays homage to Evelyn Waugh when Paul discovers his letters: “a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence in its own interest.” Waugh’s influence is further alluded to upon discovery that one of the letters mentions Dudley Valance as “the younger brother of the First World War poet.” It’s Cambridge instead of Oxford, explicit gay sex rather than homoerotic tension and Corley Court stands in for Brideshead, but the spectre of Waugh’s masterpiece is present at every turn, with plenty of originality thrown in for good measure.

Review #3 by Marnie Brennan, Mt Macedon, VIC

The much anticipated new novel by Booker prize winner Alan Hollinghurst does not disappoint. It displays characteristic deftness of touch and delicious irony in its treatment of the themes of class, sexuality, legitimacy and memory.

Central is the poem ‘Two Acres’ written by the aristocratic Cecil Valance whilst on a weekend visit with his friend George Sawle’s family in 1913. George and Cecil are friends ‘In the Cambridge way’, but it is common belief that the famous poem was written for George’s 16 year old sister Daphne. The poem is written as the Great War looms; a time where even grief is hierarchical in class steeped England.

Set in 5 different times and locations, The Stranger’s Child explores themes of literary heritage, class, war, sexuality, family and frailty. The social changes observed over nearly a century are portrayed with customary lightness of touch and brilliant prose. The Valances and the Sawles are linked from the start. Death magnifies this connection, with the poem becoming the subject of much attention and speculation by critics, students and biographers alike. With delicious irony, Dudley Valance muses that ‘It always rather amused me that my brother, who was heir to three thousand acres, should be best known for his ode to a mere two.’

The reader is thrown into a scene at once familiar and intriguing, more Brideshead than Beauty, and the literary tradition is both acknowledged and biography questioned. ‘He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories’, observes Daphne of Cecil’s biographer, the obsequious Paul Bryant.

Hollinghurst has the uncanny ability to make the reader feel instantly comfortable in his gardens and dining rooms, and strangely privy to and insightful about what lies in store for his characters.

Review #4 by Liana Moore, Melbourne, VIC

In the summer of 1913 Cecil Valance visits the home of his friend George Sawle, meets his teenage sister Daphne and writes a poem that is to become renowned as capturing the spirit of an England on the brink of inescapable change. The events of this single weekend serve to the entwine fates of the two families and the effects will reverberate through the decades.

Not just the story of individual and family fortunes, The Strangers Child explores changing tastes, attitudes, morality, sexual mores and social structure as the story unfolds over a century on the backdrop of a dramatically changing England. Full of wonderfully constructed phrases, witty insights and irresistible irony, the boarder themes are explored from individual perspectives as the reader is drawn in to the desires and motives of numerous characters.

Constantly shifting viewpoints may initially be jarring, but revaluation through new and very different perspectives is essential to the developing story and to fully exploring the events and issues raised. Careful crafting by Alan Hollinghurst means that each time the story shifts in to a new character we are inextricably immersed in a new world. The novel jumps forward through the decades, often from moments of critical change in characters lives, leaving the reader to gradually piece together the events of the intervening years. While some characters appear again and again, others are introduced only to quickly vanish – perhaps mentioned in later reminiscing, perhaps never thought of again.

Through all these shifts in time and viewpoint the literary legacy of Cecil Valance is felt, interpreted and reinterpreted along with changing social and sexual mores and skewed by the varying ambitions and desires of those who seek to own it.

The Stranger’s Child is a book to read slowly, stopping often to absorb the brilliant prose and ponder ideas and questions raised surrounding memory, truth, legacy, relationships, sexuality, death and love. An absorbing and beautiful novel that deserves rereading, this should become one of the essential reads of the year.

Review #5 by Megan Clement, Brusnwick East, VIC

I remember sitting in the bedroom of a holiday house, with the sun blazing outside as the summer raced away, tearing through the last pages of The Line of Beauty. The heady, scandal-laced tale of conservatism and counter-culture, cocaine and class that veered between parliament house and the bath house was a startling evocation of gay life in the 80s. It hurtled towards a breathtaking conclusion that smacks of the current British media crisis. It was dangerous. It was clever. It was brave.

The Stranger's Child is certainly clever. But it's a ponderous tome that plods through the twentieth century and dips its toe into the twenty-first, never committing itself to a particular decade. And it's Hollinghurst, so it's written with an casual ease that belies its deftness, but for those of us who waited seven years for his next novel, The Stranger's Child is ultimately unsatisfying.

Which is not to say that it's not a good read. Hollinghurst writes convincingly with the ambition of a late career author. He has the confidence to spread his net wide enough to capture one hundred years of history, and give it a new voice. One of the major delights of the novel is the way he weaves references to time through the text as he jumps between decades. Rather than merely emblazoning each chapter with a date, we are allowed to feel our way round the narrative, slowly working out whether we're in 1967 or 79, 1913 or 39.

And when he gets it right, he soars. The first half of the novel, set before and after the two World Wars, is full of the cutting social satire and intrigue we have come to expect. He takes on the pragmatic, intellectual world of Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That, creating a wistful, puckish bisexual poet and dropping him in the trenches of the First World War.

The Stranger's Child then becomes a study of what war does to men - how it maims, it kills, it mars. We see survivors bumbling through the post-war years, limping on wounded limbs, humbled by agoraphobia, haunted by the dead.

But the further we get from the war, as we enter the latter half of the twentieth century, the novel loses its grip. We don't care for the new characters as much as the old, and the chronological signposts begin to jar. By the time we reach 2008, we're rattled by awkward references to iPhones and text-speak. We long for the languid, gin-soaked afternoons of 1913, our Gravesian hero and the people he burns.

In many ways, The Stranger's Child is a study in literary lightweights. We start with Cecil Valance - the charming, dangerous, but ultimately second-rate poet. It's a brave challenge to insert a new, invented member into the British literary canon, one taken on with startling hubris, and success, by A.S. Byatt in Possession (1990). So it's a relief when we find out that history has not smiled on the precocious poet, that his poems are seen as, as they seem to us, twee, pastoral fancies.

And it doesn't stop with Cecil. His brother Dudley writes a minority successful work, never tops it and remains forever bitter. Valance's late-century biographer is seen as salacious and untrustworthy in literary circles, his wartime fiancée Daphne writes an error-riddled memoir of muddy recollections, her brother Gerald manges to bash out a school history book before descending into dementia.

What are we to think of this study in partial success and humbling failure? Why does Hollinghurst deny his characters greatness? Why does this ambitious novel pull back before it reaches the crest of the ogee?

It seems in more ways than one, Hollinghurst is reluctant to follow the line of beauty.

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