Scan barcode
rageofachilles's review against another edition
3.0
This book reminded me a bit of A.S. Byatt's Possession. The narrative, though, isn't focused so much on uncovering a secret romance as charting the development of social response to homosexuality in Britain. It is about poetry, and there is a fun detective game played out through literary studies (or biographical studies). The book does a good job, though, of not making the story too much about the poetry of Cecil Valance (by not giving us the full text) and more about the people he knew and affected.
The story is divided into sections with a lot of years in between each section. Much of the "whiplash" of a new section is orienting the reader to the new people and setting of this section (sometimes people's names even change). This would be my one complaint about the book. The changes made it hard at times to follow the actions. Otherwise, a fine novel.
The story is divided into sections with a lot of years in between each section. Much of the "whiplash" of a new section is orienting the reader to the new people and setting of this section (sometimes people's names even change). This would be my one complaint about the book. The changes made it hard at times to follow the actions. Otherwise, a fine novel.
martine_01's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25
krobart's review against another edition
2.0
See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/day-1100-the-strangers-child/
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/day-1100-the-strangers-child/
kathieboucher's review against another edition
5.0
What makes a life true and real, especially when people can't see the whole picture even while they're living it? What will be left of all of it after we're gone? Terrific writing posing questions about love, heritage, and legacy.
charlottej's review
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
3.25
mikewa14's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book - it really drew me in and left me with a sense of loss when it ended
my full review here
http://0651frombrighton.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-strangers-child-alan-hollinghurst.html
my full review here
http://0651frombrighton.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-strangers-child-alan-hollinghurst.html
circlepines's review against another edition
1.0
Picked it up, read the first third, couldn’t persuade myself to keep going. You’ve heard this story before: bright young poet killed in World War I leaves behind traces of a same-sex romance, which modern researcher uncovers, cue scandal. Hollinghurst has a remarkable and subtle way of capturing characters’ mannerisms and the details of a place. But the whole book (okay, at least the first third) is like that… subtle… so subtle that in 150 pages, nothing quite happened except for a few dinner parties and some scenic strolls. The characters just were not interesting enough to sustain my interest through yet another dinner party and a poky, predictable plot.
millennial_dandy's review against another edition
4.0
"I have memories of memories" -- Lady Daphne Valance
This is my second Hollinghurst, and I am pleased to say my hope after reading 'The Swimming-Pool Library' that he would mature as a writer as he went along came true! 'The Stranger's Child' plays perfectly into the strengths of that first novel, namely Hollinghurst's technical writing skills and determination to be a queer historian.
The 'Stranger's Child' itself feels like a combination of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice' and Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' (which would come out six years later). We get the queerness and the cottage-core aesthetic from Forster, and the investigation into the mythologizing of a historic figure from La Farge.
A big brick of a book at five and a half hundred pages, 'The Stranger's Child', in a phrase, is an exploration of the evolution of queer visibility and acceptance in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and how it correlated with the decay of the rigid class structure of Edwardian England. But it's equally a discussion of how myth very easily overshadows fact, sometimes because it has to, and sometimes because it's more convenient.
At the center of the plot lies the question: 'just who was Cecil Valance?' He's a World War One era poet, sort of. His most famous poem, 'Two Acres' is described in the text as mediocre, yet after being quoted by the prime minister, both poem and poet (by then killed in action in the war) become emblematic of England's 'Lost Generation' and the way of life that was lost with them. The poem didn't have to be good; it just had to capture something of the zeitgeist -- the kind of poem made for school kids to memorize; a digestible, subliminal bit of patriotism.
The poet behind a work that would become so ubiquitous and so closely tied to English identity has to adhere to a certain purity of character in the public consciousness, and so upon his tragic death, his immediate family and friends close ranks to ensure that anything untoward about his life remains hidden from the public.
Just what those untoward things might have been becomes the (sort of) mystery at the heart of the plot after a time jump from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Works on the figures and stories of 'The Great War' era are in vogue, and two young men find themselves drawn to the enigmatic, romantic figure of Cecil Valance. They each come to be entangled (to greater and lesser degree) with the poet's remaining family, principally his younger sister, Daphne--now an old woman, and his niece (or is she?), Corinna.
The family, which at the beginning of the novel in 1913, is at its peak in terms of wealth and status, is now in decline, no longer glamorous aristocrats, but middle class with a pedigree. In the end, they end up a punchline: destitute hoarders and drunks who absurdly still hold the titles of 'Lord' and 'Lady'.
While the aristocrats fall into decay in the shadows of their decaying villas and manor houses, the queers step tentatively out into the sunshine.
It's 1967, and England is on the verge of passing the 'Sexual Offences Act' which would decriminalize sex between men, and allow our protagonists of the chapter, Paul and Peter, to pursue, if not a full blown 'out' relationship, certainly at least one that wouldn't land them in prison and could even be allowed to develop within a community, albeit one that was still on the fringes of society. It's also the first time gay folks have the opportunity to look backwards and dare to try to find themselves in history.
But despite the changing times, Cecil Valance's family isn't willing to allow him to be put under that inquisitive microscope, dancing around not only questions of his relationships with men, but avoiding saying anything at all that would tarnish the image of Cecil as the golden boy of his generation, and their own reputations by extension (though by this point, all of these people have an overinflated sense of their import in the public consciousness).
Because we get to meet Cecil at the opening of the novel, we readers know the answers to things the characters post-time jump can only speculate about, including who the famous poem 'Two Acres' was actually written for.
Hollinghurst has said in multiple interviews that a major preoccupation he has as a gay author is queer history and how that history has shaped queer identity over time-- those ripples visible even today. That was clear in 'The Swimming-Pool Library' and it's very clear here. Really, 'The Stranger's Child' feels like the book 'The Swimming-Pool Library' wanted to be. Or at least, what I wanted it to be, and I'm so glad he wrote it for that reason alone.
By showing us queer characters in three vastly different epochs (the 19-teens, the 60s/70s, and the mid-2000s), Hollinghurst leaves us feeling optimistic, and with the hope that future generations won't have to press 80 year old women for juicy tales of her ex-fiancé or poke around in condemned buildings looking for lost love letters to find scraps of themselves in history.
'The Stranger's Child' was published in 2011, and that optimism of the 2010s about the future of the LGBT+ community feels rather naive now in light of the recent culture war determined to play tug of war with queer rights. After over a century of feeling our rights and visibility expanding, it's scary and sad to imagine going back to Cecil Valance's world, one that hurt, if not his life, the lives and happiness of those caught in the fallout of having loved him.
No one in this novel is without reproach, and it's hard to say whether any of the characters are altogether good people with purely good intentions. Even the would-be Cecil Valance biographer, whose initial wish is to know if the poet he admires was like him, becomes so convinced of the importance of his mission, and so caught up in the mystery that he stops caring about the real people in front of him. It raises questions about the ethics of biography, about the veracity
and trustworthiness of memory, about the ability to find concrete answers, and even the degree to which it matters.
Indeed, Hollinghurst says of this aspect of the novel: "my subject was more to do with, not remembering, but forgetting, and the way so much about the past, about our own lives, is sort of irrevocably lost to us."
Who was Cecil Valance?
He was the person each era needed him to be.
I really, really enjoyed my time with this novel. Yes, it was overwritten, and I also wish it had been structured differently, rearranged so that we meet Cecil at the end in a sort of post-script so that the 'mystery' was actually a mystery, and I might have cut most if not all of the episodes in 1926 and 1967; the intrigue they spawned felt more like the tendrils of television series subplots than something this novel needed to keep itself streamlined. But it's an engaging, sprawling, beautifully rendered novel, and you can feel Hollinghurst's love for the characters and the world he created for them oozing out of it (hence, the overwriting I daresay).
I was on the fence after 'The Swimming-Pool Library', but post-'The Stranger's Child' I would definitely count myself a Hollinghurst fan, and I fully intend to check out his latest novel, 'The Sparsholt Affair' when I'm ready for another tome that could double as a doorstop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a bit of a postscript, in an interview for Radio National, Hollinghurst reveals that two of his big inspirations for the novel were the life and legacy of real life WWI poet Robert Brooke, many elements of which Hollinghurst says he "rather shamelessly lifted," and Michael Holroyd's biography of the writer Lytton Strachy, originally published in 1967. Just thought I'd mention for anyone else inspired to go down a little rabbit hole after they finish the novel.
This is my second Hollinghurst, and I am pleased to say my hope after reading 'The Swimming-Pool Library' that he would mature as a writer as he went along came true! 'The Stranger's Child' plays perfectly into the strengths of that first novel, namely Hollinghurst's technical writing skills and determination to be a queer historian.
The 'Stranger's Child' itself feels like a combination of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice' and Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' (which would come out six years later). We get the queerness and the cottage-core aesthetic from Forster, and the investigation into the mythologizing of a historic figure from La Farge.
A big brick of a book at five and a half hundred pages, 'The Stranger's Child', in a phrase, is an exploration of the evolution of queer visibility and acceptance in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and how it correlated with the decay of the rigid class structure of Edwardian England. But it's equally a discussion of how myth very easily overshadows fact, sometimes because it has to, and sometimes because it's more convenient.
At the center of the plot lies the question: 'just who was Cecil Valance?' He's a World War One era poet, sort of. His most famous poem, 'Two Acres' is described in the text as mediocre, yet after being quoted by the prime minister, both poem and poet (by then killed in action in the war) become emblematic of England's 'Lost Generation' and the way of life that was lost with them. The poem didn't have to be good; it just had to capture something of the zeitgeist -- the kind of poem made for school kids to memorize; a digestible, subliminal bit of patriotism.
The poet behind a work that would become so ubiquitous and so closely tied to English identity has to adhere to a certain purity of character in the public consciousness, and so upon his tragic death, his immediate family and friends close ranks to ensure that anything untoward about his life remains hidden from the public.
Just what those untoward things might have been becomes the (sort of) mystery at the heart of the plot after a time jump from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Works on the figures and stories of 'The Great War' era are in vogue, and two young men find themselves drawn to the enigmatic, romantic figure of Cecil Valance. They each come to be entangled (to greater and lesser degree) with the poet's remaining family, principally his younger sister, Daphne--now an old woman, and his niece (or is she?), Corinna.
The family, which at the beginning of the novel in 1913, is at its peak in terms of wealth and status, is now in decline, no longer glamorous aristocrats, but middle class with a pedigree. In the end, they end up a punchline: destitute hoarders and drunks who absurdly still hold the titles of 'Lord' and 'Lady'.
While the aristocrats fall into decay in the shadows of their decaying villas and manor houses, the queers step tentatively out into the sunshine.
It's 1967, and England is on the verge of passing the 'Sexual Offences Act' which would decriminalize sex between men, and allow our protagonists of the chapter, Paul and Peter, to pursue, if not a full blown 'out' relationship, certainly at least one that wouldn't land them in prison and could even be allowed to develop within a community, albeit one that was still on the fringes of society. It's also the first time gay folks have the opportunity to look backwards and dare to try to find themselves in history.
But despite the changing times, Cecil Valance's family isn't willing to allow him to be put under that inquisitive microscope, dancing around not only questions of his relationships with men, but avoiding saying anything at all that would tarnish the image of Cecil as the golden boy of his generation, and their own reputations by extension (though by this point, all of these people have an overinflated sense of their import in the public consciousness).
Because we get to meet Cecil at the opening of the novel, we readers know the answers to things the characters post-time jump can only speculate about, including who the famous poem 'Two Acres' was actually written for.
Hollinghurst has said in multiple interviews that a major preoccupation he has as a gay author is queer history and how that history has shaped queer identity over time-- those ripples visible even today. That was clear in 'The Swimming-Pool Library' and it's very clear here. Really, 'The Stranger's Child' feels like the book 'The Swimming-Pool Library' wanted to be. Or at least, what I wanted it to be, and I'm so glad he wrote it for that reason alone.
By showing us queer characters in three vastly different epochs (the 19-teens, the 60s/70s, and the mid-2000s), Hollinghurst leaves us feeling optimistic, and with the hope that future generations won't have to press 80 year old women for juicy tales of her ex-fiancé or poke around in condemned buildings looking for lost love letters to find scraps of themselves in history.
'The Stranger's Child' was published in 2011, and that optimism of the 2010s about the future of the LGBT+ community feels rather naive now in light of the recent culture war determined to play tug of war with queer rights. After over a century of feeling our rights and visibility expanding, it's scary and sad to imagine going back to Cecil Valance's world, one that hurt, if not his life, the lives and happiness of those caught in the fallout of having loved him.
No one in this novel is without reproach, and it's hard to say whether any of the characters are altogether good people with purely good intentions. Even the would-be Cecil Valance biographer, whose initial wish is to know if the poet he admires was like him, becomes so convinced of the importance of his mission, and so caught up in the mystery that he stops caring about the real people in front of him. It raises questions about the ethics of biography, about the veracity
and trustworthiness of memory, about the ability to find concrete answers, and even the degree to which it matters.
Indeed, Hollinghurst says of this aspect of the novel: "my subject was more to do with, not remembering, but forgetting, and the way so much about the past, about our own lives, is sort of irrevocably lost to us."
Who was Cecil Valance?
He was the person each era needed him to be.
I really, really enjoyed my time with this novel. Yes, it was overwritten, and I also wish it had been structured differently, rearranged so that we meet Cecil at the end in a sort of post-script so that the 'mystery' was actually a mystery, and I might have cut most if not all of the episodes in 1926 and 1967; the intrigue they spawned felt more like the tendrils of television series subplots than something this novel needed to keep itself streamlined. But it's an engaging, sprawling, beautifully rendered novel, and you can feel Hollinghurst's love for the characters and the world he created for them oozing out of it (hence, the overwriting I daresay).
I was on the fence after 'The Swimming-Pool Library', but post-'The Stranger's Child' I would definitely count myself a Hollinghurst fan, and I fully intend to check out his latest novel, 'The Sparsholt Affair' when I'm ready for another tome that could double as a doorstop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a bit of a postscript, in an interview for Radio National, Hollinghurst reveals that two of his big inspirations for the novel were the life and legacy of real life WWI poet Robert Brooke, many elements of which Hollinghurst says he "rather shamelessly lifted," and Michael Holroyd's biography of the writer Lytton Strachy, originally published in 1967. Just thought I'd mention for anyone else inspired to go down a little rabbit hole after they finish the novel.