The Stranger's Child

Picking up a book at Heathrow airport is a special process. You are choosing what form of entertainment will singularly be available to you for the next seven or so hours. It’s a rather daunting choice when you look at it closely, and lets face it, airports aren’t exactly known for their stellar selection of novels. Imagine my surprise when I stepped into the bookshop at Heathrow on my way back from Oxford and found Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, staring me down from an upper shelf. The store was offering a buy 1, get 1 deal, and since I already had one book in my hand, I found myself grabbing this one with the vague remembrance of reading another Hollinghurst novel earlier in the year. For those of you who are already familiar with Hollinghurst and his general subject matter, you will appreciate the wonderful irony of the other book I was holding being titled Cox. For those of you unfamiliar with this author, his agenda must be put rather bluntly. Hollinghurst is a gay author writing about gay characters; with the goal of breaking the established divide between a love story and a gay love story.

            In this particular novel, the reader is treated to not just one gay character, but many, spanning the decades of the sweeping family drama. Hollinghurst introduces his readers to Cecil Valance, a charming young Cambridge poet, who is visiting his friend (and lover) George’s house for the weekend. With his brash wit and unmatchable belief is his own desirability, Cecil leaves the household in a whirlwind of varying feelings and memories, that are followed throughout the subsequent sections of the story, long after Cecil himself has faded into the background. Particularly embroiled in this ongoing story is George’s younger sister Daphne, whose presence throughout the rest of the novel serves as the continuous thread for the story, even as sections deviate away from her personal thoughts and into those of outsiders trying to understand the part she played in the famous poet’s life.

            This segmented structure of the novel seems to be an attempt to keep things fresh and the reader interested over the course of five hundred plus pages. Hollinghurst only lets the reader begin to understand where the narrator is coming from and what they aim to do before rapidly shifting, often moving ahead in time at least a decade or two. We meet George, Daphne, a confident schoolmaster called Peter, and Paul, a nervous biographer, and finally a bookseller called Rob. The novel loses steam in the sections that are told from Peter and Paul’s point of view, partially because they occur within a similar time frame and introduce many of the same figures we’ve already seen. Paul is also simply an unlikable man, too nervous about his sexuality to ever be happy and too overconfident in his ability to write Cecil’s biography to ever have much success. The last section of course calls this initial assessment into question, but then again, that seems to be the last sections purpose anyways. Towards the end of the novel, the question of which narrator can the reader trust comes up, as earlier points of view are discredited in their old age and newer ones are revealed to have been keeping vast secrets. In the end it seems Hollinghurst aims to leave the reader guessing, and perhaps even a bit unsatisfied with the knowledge that we may never truly know what happened in a particular instance, even if we were there. No amount of later research, or discovery of lost books will help us to piece together the mystery. It is simply lost to the blowing smoke of time.

            The one true fault I find in this novel, besides its pacing issues in the middle, is Hollinghurst’s obsession with not writing about sex. He swiftly draws his characters into erotic situations, hinting like mad at all the dirty thoughts going through the men’s minds, and yet when the moment comes, he immediately cuts away to a different scene. The reader is left with barely a coherent suggestion of what happened. While this works in the context of the novel, and does go against the increase of sex for sex’s sake in many recent novels, there were moments when all I wanted was to have some details instead of heavily veiled hints! In this day and age no one is truly shocked by two men having sex, and there are certainly ways to write erotically without descending into pornography and sacrificing the literary art the author strives for. The Stranger’s Child as been touted by other reviewers as “one of the best novels published this year” and “a remarkable, unmissable achievement.” While I’m not ready to throw my hat in with those calling it the best novel of the year, I will say that for it’s broad scope and slippery subject matter, Alan Hollinghurst has written a novel of substance and charm that is worth putting one’s energies into.