The Stranger's Child (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Hollinghurst often reminds me of E.M.Forster with his nostalgia for the early C20 and his focus on the minute details of people's thoughts, observations of one another and interrelationships, all presented in well-crafted prose (apart from the odd clunky phrase like "she said carryingly").

Charismatic, arrogant and manipulative, the aristocratic Cecil Valance achieves a possibly undeserved popularity as a poet after his early death in the First World War. Can the truth of his life ever be told by biographers? This seems unlikely since even those who claim to know him have very different perceptions. In five separate sections separated by gaps of several years or even decades, the author aims to show the false nature of memory.

You could argue that Hollinghurst is daring in discarding many of the "conventions" of novel-writing. The development of a strong plot is given second place to what often reads like a series of short stories: portrayals of characters who make only brief appearances, or the description of quite minor incidents, evocative of past generations, but very amusing, ludicrous or in the style of a black comedy. The author tends to build up anticipation of a certain outcome, only for it not to occur, insofar as one can judge! Significant events are frequently no more than implied.

Although this book promises much, my growing suspicion that it would not deliver proved justified. It suffers from being too long, repetitive in its limited revelations and self-indulgent, not least in its campness - I grew tired of "blushing" and "giggling" men of all ages.

It does not bother me that most of the characters are very middle class , but there are certainly too many of them to relate to easily, and I was left feeling I had waded through an Oxford don's overblown soap opera fantasy.

I know that "the stranger's child" is a quotation from Tennyson's "In Memoriam" read aloud by Cecil in Part 1, and thanks to Roderick Blythe for explaining to me in the comment below its meaning in the title.

I read The Stranger's Child with some trepidation having not greatly enjoyed Line Of Beauty. I had pigeon holed Alan Hollinghurst as a pompous man who was obsessed by the class system, big houses, Oxbridge and gay sex. After reading the first part of The Stranger's Child, I was reassured to see that my prejudices were well founded. A book I could truly loathe.

But as the novel wore on, something quite subtle happened. It became more and more engrossing - the gradual layering of history; the changing perceptions over time. Cecil the dandy of Part One became a hero, and then a cult and finally a distant and second hand memory. His light burned brightly for a while, but he slipped back to the marginalia of literature.

Hollinghurst's technique is to report very few events in real time. He narrates through set piece parties, gatherings, weekends when conversation turns to past events. This can be frustrating at first (and I don't think it ever stopped being frustrating in Line of Beauty) but it is used to very good effect in The Stranger's Child - allowing different perspectives and allowing changes in perception or opinion over time. This was echoed in Cecil's most famous poem, Two Acres, and his letters - being controlled, edited and drip fed by those holding the documents to amend public perception of the man. By the end, the real Cecil was irrelevant - people each had their own personal agenda to pursue and the memory of the man was manipulated to those ends.

The writing, whilst well done, is not particularly flowery or pompous. The pomposity of the opening sections mellows and by the end, one is prepared to accept that it derives from the characters and situations rather than the author. And the characters do feel real; even the women (perhaps especially the women) feel real in contrast to the rather wooden women of Line of Beauty. There is a challenge each time the timeframe shifts in working out who is who and what has happened. It is not even immediately clear how far time has shifted - the reader is left to puzzle it all out. The first time this happened, as Part 1 moved into Part 2, it was disconcerting. By the end it was exhilarating. After Part 5, there was a pang of loss as there was no Part 6.

If there was one reservation with the novel, it is that it left the reason for the falling fortunes of the Valances unexplained. The reader is simply expected to take it as fact. But it wasn't a novel about the Valances as real people so much as a novel about reputations and relationships.

I hoped to hate the book - I'm glad to have loved it.

There is something I do not like about Hollinghurst's leading characters. Often they are thieves. In `The Folding Star' our narrator steals boys' unwashed underpants to order and sells them to sexual fetishists. The theme of `The Stranger's Child' seems to be of a biographer as thief from people's lives - sometimes rummaging through dustbins for informative scraps like a tramp in the pay of a tabloid journalist, sometimes intruding into homes under the false colours of professionalism of friendship. The focus is on the tawdry - looking beyond the writing to the sex. In the process of biography, we lose the complexity of real life, and the biographer becomes more like a member of the paparrazi - chasing the hapless celebrity down the street but continuing the pursuit into the victim's dotage. Our leading man exploits the recollections of someone whose age, loss of inhibition and declining mind combine to indiscretion - is this the `truth' after all?

In the course of all this, we have the opportunity to explore succeeding generations of sexual mores and pretty young men - and the move to openness and civil partnerships. Maybe Alan Hollinghurst regrets the passing of days when it was all more underhand and the writer was outside the rules, collecting his material in the world of bar and bed gossip, innuendo and blackmail, and using it to worm his way into `society'.