THE STRANGER’S CHILD by Alan Hollinghurst: Book Review [The Ryan Dixon Line]

To start, let’s compare Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel The Stranger’s Child to the Boston Red Sox.

In 2004, Hollinghurst won the Man Booker Prize (Britain’s highest literary award) for his previous novel, The Line of Beauty. That same year the Boston Red Sox won their first world series in 86 years. Most sports prognosticators predicted that the Red Sox would play in the World Series this year just as The Stranger’s Child was the prohibitive favorite to win the Booker. Two weeks ago the Red Sox completed a historic September collapse and failed to make the playoffs. When the Booker shortlist was announced in September, The Stranger’s Child was nowhere to be seen.

To drag the sports metaphor to its inevitable, clichéd conclusion: on paper, The Stranger’s Child seemed built to win awards.  With a century-spanning narrative, meticulously rendered scenes of alcohol-infused parties at vast country estates and a cast of literate, witty, repressed Brits in the throes of  forbidden romance, you can practically hear the Hollywood pitch: “It’s Possession meets Atonement meets Brideshead Revisited.”

Broken into four major parts with a short epilogue, the opening sequence takes place over a weekend in 1913, when fledgling poet Cecil Vance visits the two acre family home of his Cambridge schoolmate George Sawle. George and Cecil are far more than just friends and share a magical weekend that inspires Cecil to compose an ode to his visit entitled “Two Acres,” part of which reads:

“The book left out beneath the trees,
Read over backwards by the breeze.
The spinney where the lisping larches
Kiss overhead in silver arches
And in their shadows lovers too
Might kiss and tell their secrets through.“

As Cecil departs the Sawle home at the end of the first section, Hollinghurst shows that he’s as equally skilled at creating narrative sleight of hands as he is at designing immaculate prose. The reader is suddenly left wondering whether the “lovers” in the poem are not actually Cecil and George, but Cecil and George’s little sister, Daphne.  Like the best magic tricks, we never see it coming even though it was in front of our eyes the whole time.

The second part of the book opens a little over a decade later. Cecil has been killed in World War I and his posthumous reputation as a poet has grown along with his emotional hold over the Valance and Sawle family, who are now irrevocably connected in deeper, more destructive ways. While the family attempts, decade after decade, to escape the specter of Cecil’s memory, the question of to whom “Two Acres” was intended obsesses two young men whose first date is a visit to Cecil’s tomb. Eventually, one of them makes it his mission to finally discover the truth.

Hollinghurst has written a masterpiece, but it’s buried deep within the fatty folds of this novel. Favoring structural symmetry over narrative momentum, all four major sections are allocated an almost equal amount of page space. And while the slow burn revelations that result from such glacial pacing are satisfying, Hollinghurst seems to compensate for the scarcity of plot in the novel’s second half with an almost uncontrollable form of descriptive OCD. It’s one thing to set the scene, quite another to provide a complete ground plan as our author does during a character’s first visit to the house where an older Daphne now resides:

“Something about the clashing curtains and the carpet, both nice enough in themselves, made Paul feel acutely lonely, the three mirrors of the dressing-table blacking the evening sun. The bulb in the ceiling light glowed in weak competition with it. There was the matching suite, dressing-table, wardrobe, bed with quilted headboard, and then nothing that went with anything else. They had the air of things not wanted elsewhere in the house, the scratchy armchair, the wrought-iron lamp, the souvenir ashtrays, the brown wool rug made by Mr. Marsh himself, at what must have been a low moment.”

Just because you can describe something, doesn’t mean that you should. (Even if you do it wonderfully well.)

And yet, in the last quarter of the book, this same density of detail allows the reader to know more about the mystery behind “Two Acres” than Paul Bryant, the aspiring writer attempting to compose a biography of Cecil Vance. Since we have experienced the most significant moments of seemingly every member of the Valance and Sawle family, we are angered and annoyed when Bryant fails to ask characters follow-up questions that, while having nothing to do with Cecil, would have unlocked their own precious remembrances.

In those passages, The Stranger’s Child holds an unflattering mirror up to our own mortality as Hollinghurst forces us to confront one of life’s most unpleasant truths: our most cherished memories are everyone else’s afterthoughts.

Follow Ryan Dixon on Twitter @ryanbdixon. Order a copy of his graphic novel Hell House: The Awakening here.

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