What Book to Read?

After his book The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, Hollinghurst said that it brought to an end the sequence of books in which he has consciously explored gay identity and its fight for recognition.  The Stranger’s Child (2011) is his first book since then, and yes, he has gone beyond being ‘just’ a gay writer – if in fact that was what he ever was.

The story is told in five parts. Each is a fragment, complete in itself but part of a larger story, different aspects of which are revealed in each section. Some of what has gone on in between is alluded to, but some is withheld, and of interest to those in subsequent sections, and of course to the reader. The connections are rich and subtle, and I won’t go into them here, because the interest of them is part of the book’s appeal. Suffice to say it begins in 1913. Cecil Valance is spending a weekend with his Cambridge friend, George Sawle, at George’s comfortable middle class house, ‘Two Acres’, in an outer London suburb – then more of a village. Valance, a poet and something of a celebrity at Cambridge, is heir to a baronetcy and a landed estate, Corley Court. It is clear to the reader from the start that Cecil and George are lovers, but not of course to George’s family. The second part is set in 1926; it deals with another weekend, this time a house party at Corley Court arranged so that a biographer can interview people who knew Cecil, who died in the First World War. The third section is set in 1967; Corely Court is now a school, and two more young men, one of them a teacher there, are falling in love. The main action again involves a party with the Sawle family and others, or their heirs, from the earlier sections.  In the fourth section, set in 1979, another biographer is researching a life of Cecil Valance, and there is a brief coda set at a funeral in 2008.

Hollinghurst says that ‘From the start I’ve tried to write books which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position. To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position.’ And certainly several of the major male characters here are gay as a matter of course. In a major departure, however, there is also an important female character, Daphne, who is not gay, and Hollinghurst seems to me to do an excellent job of understanding and presenting her feelings. Of course he has never wanted to be known as primarily a gay writer: ‘I only chafe at the ‘gay writer’ tag if it’s thought to be what is most or only interesting about what I’m writing,’ he says. ‘I want it to be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other things as well – history, class, culture.’ Here, I think he has succeeded brilliantly. The subtle class differences, for example, between Cecil, and George and his family at Two Acres, are cleverly evoked. They help create an almost unbearable narrative tension that originates in the hidden homosexuality of the two young men but goes well beyond it.

But history, in the form of biography – or rather the unreliability of biography – is surely the major theme of the book. Some facts are unknown and unknowable. Others manage just to elude the biographers’ eager (greedy?) hands. Some things that seem like facts are not. Some characters might wish to be truthful, but find it impossible to be so. Daphne, for example, acknowledges: ‘What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt about what she thought then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say.’ Memory is completely fallible. Daphne again: ‘He [the biographer] was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.’ Some of the characters prefer concealment. And how far does the biographer simply assert things without a solid basis of evidence? How far do other people believe them? The reader ends up knowing a bit more than the characters about what happened, but we are still left with a satisfyingly realistic measure of doubt.

In a review in The Guardian, one critic states that Hollinghurst ‘has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today’, though he thinks this is not his best work. I understand why he makes this claim. Hollinghurst writes beautifully, and the nuanced and clever plot is a delight. The critic goes on to say: ‘It almost seems as if Hollinghurst is refuting the most commonly made criticisms of his work: that he’s not very interested in women; that there’s too much sex; that his writing is too lush; that his characters are not likeable. These objections, incidentally, seem to me largely philistine or dishonest … And, flawlessly executed though this book is, it has rather less bite than its predecessors.’ I agree that none of the characters is particularly likeable. By showing them from a number of perspectives, Hollinghurst shows them as fully fallible – a realistic, though somewhat depressing perspective. But for the rest, I guess I’m either philistine or dishonest.

The book made only the long list for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, but I liked it better than the book that won – Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending; see my review of it here. There’s almost nothing about Hollinghurst on the internet. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t have a web page.