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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.
milly_in_the_library's review
2.0
finally, I've finished this! i really didn't enjoy the parts where I felt I was wading through thick sludge to get to its end...there were some good ideas to this book, but i felt they were at times somewhat laboured, and it could've been a good 200pages shorter!!
I'm afraid I cannot recommend this!
I'm afraid I cannot recommend this!
susannavs's review
3.0
I can't quite decide if I liked this...the jumps forward in time could be a bit confusing until you worked out how the new character (who's POV the new section was in) fit into the main story. And I'm guessing the aim was to keep us guessing about Daphne and Cecil, but it feels a bit inconclusive.
danieltodd's review against another edition
3.0
In which classic Hollinghurst motifs of intemperate gay sex fiends and drug use are traded in for sincere character studies of women, children, the elderly..... to immeasurably boring effect. The trick is at times astonishingly beautiful, but he is a one-trick pony.
catiew's review
5.0
Incredibly enjoyable, once I got sucked in. Can’t believe I’ve not read any Alan Hollinghurst before.
sebarose's review against another edition
2.0
None of the characters were interesting enough for the reader to care whether their personal history and perceptions match public history. Since the reader was treated to an objective version of events in the first section, there is a tediousness in having to slog through 350 pages of characters guessing and stewing on shades of what took place in the first 100.
Oh, and way too many lazy adverbs. Ah, and the author should never ever have any of his characters use the words "oh" or "ah" ever again in any of his novels. He used up his allotment of those words (184 plus instances!) in this novel.
Oh, and way too many lazy adverbs. Ah, and the author should never ever have any of his characters use the words "oh" or "ah" ever again in any of his novels. He used up his allotment of those words (184 plus instances!) in this novel.
moirastone's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to like this, rather I admired the scope, appreciated the theme and variation structure of the story, and found some pleasure in the characters of Cecil and Daphne. Faint praise, I know. But it's all I can muster.