The Stranger’s Child

By Alan Hollinghurst, 2011 

I enjoyed reading The Stranger’s Child, mainly because of the glimpses it offers of gay male life at a series of points in the 20^th century. Or more narrowly, it offers pictures of gay male life in the affluent middle class in England. The first scenes are in the romantic Edwardian period before World War I blew apart the comfortable life of men’s colleges and secret societies. Then, the post-war society of the 1920s is disrupted with social decay and a somewhat bewildered questioning of values. In the upheaval of the 1960s, young men begin seeking each other out but hiding their sexuality when gay male sex was still a criminal act. This develops in the 1980s to a gay biographer looking into the tantalizing details that the relatives of his subject don’t want to talk about. By the end of the novel in the early part of the 21^st century, a campy society of same-sex marriages and funerals is commonplace, but old homophobic values still linger.

The thread that ties them together is Cecil, a charismatic and somewhat creepy young man in the first story who dies a war hero and minor poet. His relatives and numerous others reflect on his life at each point in the 20^th century as his poetry becomes famous, then a cliché, then a source for popular and academic re-examination, and finally the subject of an obscure book search. The connection to Cecil’s story becomes very thin and disputed by the end, which is probably the post-modern point of the book. In fact, the sections dealing with the biographer become almost comic as he puts his interpretation on very little evidence, while other characters actively strive to maintain their preferred interpretation. So, while giving these glimpses of gay life, Hollinghurst is also pointing out how subjective they are, and how they cannot be read simply from our current viewpoint.

While the glamour of Cecil’s privileged background is initially attractive, Paul in the later episodes is to me the most interesting character. He comes from a poor, working class town where homosexuality would be scandalous in the 1950s, and it’s interesting to see how he lives his life in his bedsitting room and banking job, but works his way into the gay literary elite of the TLS. (The picture Hollinghurst gives of the inner TLS culture seems satirically apt.) Paul is the only central character who is not from an affluent background and he seems to struggle with his identity, both as a gay man and as a literary fringe dweller. Class consciousness remains embedded in English society through all the changes of the 20^th century. It merely has different expressions at different points.

The title refers to a poem by Tennyson in which a stranger, looking at things in a new way, discovers anew something that had been lost. In the novel, the characters in each of the vignettes look on the subject and see it in a new way from their own contemporary perspective.

Not a lot happens in any of the vignettes. In a way, they reminded me of the way Henry James writes a scene – the interest is on the changing psychological relationships of the characters more than it is on anything they actually do. The characters have a lot going on internally, from their perspectives at different times and in their different relationships to homosexuality. The early scenes at the Two Acres cottage also reminded me of the domestic middle-class scenes that E.M. Forster described in some of his novels. Ironically, it all ends with a bookseller’s agent looking for saleable clues and finding none. The legend of the charismatic Cecil fades away, much like the gardened cottage that he memorialized in his most famous poem, left a crumbling site for re-development in the final scenes.

As I recall in his previous novels, Hollinghurst writes in the voice of a detached, ironic observer. This allows him a satirical and at times comic tone, although I find the detachment blocks any real engagement with the characters or the limited story line. The short length of each of the segments keeps the book moving, but it also limits a reader’s engagement. There was enough interest for me in the varied scenes of gay lives, but I think it would have been quite tedious to follow any of the characters on their own.