The Stranger's Child

Blurb: In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. Filled with intimacies and confusions, the weekend will link the families for ever, having the most lasting impact on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne.

As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, reputations rise and fall, secrets are revealed and hidden and the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story, told and interpreted in different ways by successive generations. 

Powerful, absorbing and richly comic, The Stranger’s Child is a masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of change.

I've only read one Alan Hollinghurst and that was his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (my review for which you can read here). Nestled comfortably in an uncharacteristically warm and sunny Lake District, I fell completely in love with it. As a result, when it was announced that, after seven years, he had written a new book I got all excited. Then I saw the size of The Stranger's Child and thought this slab of cake is going to need time. It wasn't going to be a commuter read, a slightly distracted daily nibble, this was going to be enjoyed, devoured even, and so I decided to wait.

The book was actually published last year (and longlisted for the Man Booker 2011) but my small hands don't much like me insisting that they support a weighty hardback on the train, and so I awaited the paperback. And what a lovely looking paperback it is, don't you think? You've really got to feel it to be honest, all silky and smooth and green and stuff. Call me weird, whatever.

My apologies, I am yet to talk about the story itself. It's one of those generational novels, the kind that spans a chunky amount of time. Love those. Cecil makes his first impression on the Sawles at their home in 1913 and it well and truly sticks. Courting anything that moved, Cecil and his charisma captured the attention of everyone who met him that weekend, be it the naive Daphne, the impressionable George, their suspicious mother.. the list goes on.

Split into five parts, the novel jumps in time at each break. The effect on me was that I had all these questions I wanted answered. What happened to such and such? How did Mr. Blah feel about that? Did Mrs. Whatsherface find out about that? HOW CAN YOU END THAT PART WITHOUT TELLING ME THESE THINGS? and at that point I calmed myself, and started to clap (metaphorically...). Well done Alan (first name terms with the author it seems). You've got me. You have successfully elicited in me exactly what you wanted. Curiosity. The entire novel is an investigation, explicitly so. Most of the answers we either know or find out before the detective (Hollinghurst calls in a couple of new characters to fulfill that role for us), which makes us feel all smart but, more cleverly, makes us understand the source of interest. We completely get why everyone wants to know more about the Valances and the Sawles - because we did too. It's also a playful novel in that way, and very funny.

I sense Hollinghurst puts himself into his books. His sense of humour, certainly. And his experiences of Oxford I am sure inform his writing of the upper classes. His sexuality is in there too. Hollinghurst isn't, I don't think, dropping in gay characters here and there and everywhere because he can, though. He's not trying to make us all go 'OOOOO. HE'S GAY.' In fact I think probably the opposite. But the homosexual themes so frequently surface that I am certain he is making a point. About how things change over time, be it people, reputation, understanding, values and the treatment of homosexuality too.

That may well be my longest review... I apologise. It's a long book. I'm a rambler. Anyway, do go out and read it. I'd lend you mine but it broke... I don't talk about that. It saddens me to think of my fingers desperately clinging to pages 231 and 232 as the sheet desperately tried to escape on a blustery top deck of a ferry...

8.5/10