Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” could hardly be better, and it’s a mystery to me — and to many others — why it didn’t make this year’s recent shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Perhaps quiet perfection is out of fashion in our noisy era.
“The Stranger’s Child” opens in the golden sunshine just before World War I, as a young Cambridge undergraduate named George Sawle brings home a poet friend, with whom he is clearly infatuated. During the weekend, Cecil Valance charms 16-year-old Daphne Sawle, escapes into the surrounding woods for a tryst with George, and scribbles a poem called “Two Acres.” Not much else happens, but the consequences of this visit are enormous for the Sawle and Valance families. Its aftereffects will last 100 years.
In this initial section of a book rich in facets and characters, Hollinghurst effortlessly channels the tone of E.M. Forster’s early novels. The dinner-table banter alludes to Tennyson and Lytton Strachey, Wagner’s operas and the Cambridge secret society known as the Apostles, while beneath the decorous surface of the conversation run myriad erotic tensions. A distinctively Edwardian high-spiritedness abounds, whether Hollinghurst describes Cecil’s pagan worship of the dawn or the young serving boy Jonah who “could write neatly, and could read almost anything, given the time.”
In the second section (of five), the novel grows darker, even as it enters the giddy world of Evelyn Waugh. Daphne has married and become the mistress of a grand Victorian house with 20 servants. Her husband, however, is having its interior modernized so that the drawing room now resembles a room in “some extremely expensive sanatorium.” Cecil Valance, we learn, died in World War I at the age of 25, but “Two Acres” has become an anthology piece, certain to be enjoyed “as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things.” Or so asserts “Sebby” Stokes, one of the late poet’s particular admirers, who has come down to Corley Court to gather material for a brief memoir. He is clearly modeled after “Eddie” Marsh, the literary executor of Rupert Brooke.
Again, Hollinghurst sets the entire action during a single country-house weekend — preserving the dramatic unities of place, time and action. He effortlessly juggles several points of view (including a 6-year-old’s), slowly revealing people’s true characters while keeping the reader guessing about the erotic intentions of various guests: Who is having an affair with whom? Many secrets are hinted at: Did Cecil write “Two Acres” for Daphne or for George? What precisely were his relations with Sebby Stokes?
Moreover, people have aged and changed. Daphne’s attractive mother — seen a decade earlier as a lonely young widow — has missed her chance to remarry. A former lover of Cecil’s has entered into a stolidly passionless marriage: He and his wife “look much more like colleagues than like a couple.” The choleric Dudley Valance, himself a writer, feels increasingly jealous of his dead older brother’s fame. Daphne’s children are afraid of their brutish father.
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