“The Stranger’s Child” by Alan Hollinghurst

An audio book.

Cecil, who has poems in Granta, is taking a break from the Cambridge of Rupert Brooke to stay with his lover, George at their stately house, Two Acres. They boast about being candid, but their lust is secret. George might be in love. Cecil has a servant who looks after him. The servant Jonah looks through Cecil’s poetry notebooks, wondering whether the fact that they’re poetry makes them more or less true. Daphne, 16, George’s sister, wants to visit Cecil. Cecil French-kisses her.

After the war, Daphne (now Lady Valance) has married Cecil's brother Dudley, a writer. Mrs Riley (a designer) and others are down for the weekend. Cecil died in the war, bravely. His "Two Acres" poem has entered the language. People think he wrote it about Daphne, but the unpublished parts suggest it was written about George. George (gay) is married to Madelene. Prof Stokes (Oxford) is visiting to research for his bio + collected works of Cecil, interviewing one person at a time in the library. Daphne's starting an affair with Revel, a young artist. She's kept Cecil's revealing letters. Mrs Riley makes a pass at her. Her young son discovers one of the old guests, dead.

Paul starts a job at a bank, ending up at the bank manager's house where he meets a grand-daughter of Revel and Daphne. She's going to Oxford. The bank manager's wife, Mrs Keeping, is a music teacher. Peter is a teacher at a boarding school (Cecil's old house). Peter meets Paul in the bank. Paul suspects Peter's gay. He fantacises. He knows the coded language of small ads. He writes in the evening and reads poetry.

They meet again at the Bank Manager's family gathering. Peter and Mrs Keeping play a duet. Paul meets George and Madelene - still together having co-written a standard history book. Peter invites Paul to see Cecil's tomb, a pretext for sex in Peter's room.

10 years later, Paul (who's had a piece or 2 in the TLS) is writing a book about Cecil. We learn about interviewing techniques. 3 years before, Mrs Keeping died and Mr Keeping committed suicide. He visits Jonah for an interview. He has photos. He interviews Dudley (now 84) He meets Madelene and senile George. The latter says that Mrs Keeping was Cecil's child, not Dudley's. He visits Daphne (her night thoughts going on too long). Wilfred's still with her.

We jump ahead to 2008, Peter's Celebratory ceremony. He had presented 2 TV series. Rob, a bookdealer, is the first person PoV. Paul is there. His book provoked a scandal. Rob knows a house-clearer. He has a book of transcribed letters from Cecil. He directs Rob to a house where there were some relevant items. When he arrives he's told that the workers have been burning useless paperwork for a day or so.

The language of the Georgian upper class, Oxbridge common rooms, first dates, and (sometimes) the working class are faithfully reproduced. Some of the internal monologues go on too long for me, and the Jonah interview section feels stretched.

Descriptions and emotions are rarely simple. Nuances are squeezed out of each moment. Your chances of liking the book depends rather on how you feel about observations/phrases like

• in the warm uncertainty of being teased
• a sense of betrayal discoloured the following seconds
• her joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind
• the sense of the sticky moment [was] still thick about him
• with a question hidden somewhere in his smile
• He passes a room "with a remembered sense of refuge"
• "The solidarity of the shy"
• The "implicit moral commentaries" of the butler
• "almost yawning with casual pride"
• "smiled tightly and looked away as if both were after the same bargain."

Other reviews

• Theo Tait (In an inversion of the Brideshead theme, the outsider, the stranger's child, is an aristocrat visiting a middle-class home and seducing the family in it ... Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. He offers surely the best available example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards. ... His best books are beautiful at the level of the sentence and impressive at the levels of character, incident and plot; they manage to be nearly perfect and great fun at the same time. ... he has limited the use of his gorgeous observational voice, which dominated his previous works. A lot of the narrative is carried by dialogue and relatively basic description. It also has a principal female character, for the first time, and the story is warmer and more forgiving than in the past. 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. )
• Emma Brockes (As Eskimos do with snow, the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world ... a story of people trapped in the wrong life ... The novel is divided into five parts, each occupying a different era and arranged around a single extended scene. (Mr. Hollinghurst does parties very well))
• Thomas Mallon (Underpinned with a range of styles that run from Iris Murdoch to William Trevor and back to Forster ... “The Stranger’s Child” is especially concerned — sometimes gravely, sometimes comically — with the effects of gay liberation on literary biography. )