“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 People think he wrote it about Daphne, but the unpublished parts suggest it was written about George.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. )

"The Sparsholt Affair" by Alan Hollinghurst

An audio book.

Part 1 - Oxford University. World war 2. 3rd year Freddy Green (it's from his PoV) has friends Peter (gay artist) and Evert (gay son of a famous novelist, Dax) who both fancy David Sparsholt, a new 1st year, only 17. David's a rower, an engineer, and engaged to big-breasted Connie. Freddie has a student girl-friend Jill, just a friend. He's comfortable in the company of gays - he went to public school, and his half-brother had slept with Auden. Freddy and his friends are in the Literature Club, and Dax is their next guest speaker. Has Peter drawn Sparsholt in the nude? Sparsholt likes sleeping with men.

Part 2 - David (married to Connie), his schoolfriend Cliff (married to Norma?), David's 14 y.o. arty gay son Johnny (his PoV) and 15.y.o. French Bastian go on a yacht and fish. Johnny and Bastion are sharing sex. Bastion joins Johnny's family on their seaside holiday to improve his English. Johnny's envious when Bastion eyes girls. He overhears Norma and his mother talk with interest about Bastion. They see Freddy on a TV quiz show.

Part 3 - Johnny is now in the arts business, learning about restoration and dealing. He meets Evert and Freddy because his friend Dennis is secretary to Evert, who's writing up his father's life ("the memo[ir] club"). There are several gays in Evert's house, and a nude sketch of Johnny's father (though Johnnny doesn't know that). He's enjoying the sexual freedom and public toilets of London. We learn that 6 years before, his father (a WW2 hero) was involved in a homosexual scandal with an MP, Cliff and male prostitutes. His father had become a pin-up for some gays, a warning to others.

Francesca, who knows Evert's group, asks him out. To his relief she takes him to a lesbian bar then a gay club. It's all new to him. So is the art world. He goes to an auction. Among regular dealers he has to quickly learn the tactics when previewing lots and dealing. It's not so unlike his experience of being amongst gays at social events. Francesca asks him if he'd like to be a sperm donor.

He goes with unfaithful Ivan to Wales for the weekend in a disposable chapter. Ivan likes older men like Evert.

Part 4 - Johnnie's daughter Lucy is 7. This part is rather from her PoV. She tries to understand the world of adults. At funerals we learn more about what happened year ago. She likes art. Johnnie meets his father, introduces him to Evert.

Part 5 - Johnnie is 60. He's commissioned to paint a family, the mother a TV celebrity. We learn about the male gaze and marketing tricks of portraits artists. His husband Pat has died. He goes out to a club for the first time in 20 years. He meets a young guy who likes older men. While in a toilet cubicle together, Johnnie looks at his phone to find his father had died. Next day he visits his step-mother of 30+ years, who he hasn't seen much. When Johnnie goes to see the body, he sketches it. The press have a field day with the obituaries. Because he'd kept the rare family name, he'd never been allowed to forget his father's disgrace. Only now do we learn anything about how it hit Johnnie at the time. Lucy's going to marry a woman.

Veiled conversation suddenly turns to physical sex. Perhaps the slow, evasive style reflects how things were then. We see the different, era-specific ways of coping with being gay. Art helps, whatever the era. Emotions often come paired - "excitement and fear", etc. Lingering glances matter - "Each knew something about the other, since Jill had been there on that evening in first week when we'd watched him half-naked across the quad, and David of course had coaxed certain romantic claims about her from me, so they each had the gleam of being in on a secret or a joke which was possibly disconcerting to the other". A final adverb (e.g. "competently") can twist a sentence. There are lots of little pleasures - what should one do if you're shy and you're with someone who attracts glances?

Other reviews

• James Lasdun (The immediate fun of this section is largely in its reviving of a particular style of fine writing, in which the rarefied pleasures of euphemism and indirectness concerning sexual matters still had a certain currency. It isn’t quite pastiche, more a sort of dead-on rendition ... there is a great scene between father and son at the RAF Club, though it serves mainly to consolidate Sparsholt as an enigma, which isn’t, for me, the most interesting of literary entities. Remarkably, the novel more than survives this slight letdown. What keeps it pulsing is really hard to say, especially as the careful formal patterning of the first three sections is also largely abandoned. It could be simply that, having laid the groundwork for one kind of novel, Hollinghurst found he had the basis for another, better suited to his gifts, which are possibly more those of a chronicler than a plotter. ... It makes for a looser, freer book than the cunning puzzle of a novel one was led to expect, and almost certainly a better one, too.)
• Alexandra Schwartz (This kind of determined evasiveness, frequently frustrating for the reader, feels like a new development for Hollinghurst, and I wonder if it is born of a wish to refuse the sorts of major twists and resolutions that he has relied on in the past.)
• Kirkus review
• Laura Miller (The Sparsholt Affair lacks the sturdy momentum of Hollinghurst’s masterpiece, The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Booker Prize. There’s little reason to worry that the likable, yearning, good-looking Johnny won’t fulfill his modest dreams. AIDS goes conspicuously unmentioned. But like all of Hollinghurst’s novels this one is still a wonder, full of wit and tenderness, rendered in prose of unostentatious, classic beauty. There is no better English stylist alive.)

"The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, 2004)

The theme of Beauty takes a while to emerge; at first (despite his university years) the main character (Nick) needs to experience.

• On p.200 Hogarth's 'line of beauty' (ogee) is mentioned, the curve of a man's back. It's perhaps no coincidence that Hogarth was a social satirist.
• On p.255 a line of coke on a mirror is described as 'a line of beauty'.
• By p.349 a character says to him that "People are lovely because we love them, not the other way round". Later on the same page he realises that "He couldn't unwind the line of beauty".
• On p.422 he thinks that "Leo wasn't imaginative: that was part of the point and the beauty of him".
• Then "Nick thought it was unusual - that was the beauty of it" (p.481).
• His final article's about the "Line of Beauty". In the final sentence of the book, as he's awaiting the results of another AIDS test, he thinks "It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful".

It's unclear how much wiser he's become in the 4 years that the book covers, but thoughts of mortality are turning his experiences of beauty into theory, and, perhaps, a guide to living. He's turning a corner on the line of beauty.

The theme in the title, and the ghostly presence of Henry James, don't weigh the prose down. Hollinghurst can deal ably with crisis and banter, large social gatherings and intimate dialogue, conversation undertow, plot and one-liners, embedding polished phrases without making them stand out. There are many phrases to relish of which the following's a small sample.

• "Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions" (p.255)
• "'The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque,' he said, as if he really couldn't be plainer" (p.304)
• "Toby was sitting in the puzzlement of bereavement" (p.336)
• (on receiving a present) "He looked in the box to see if there was a note, like the watering instructions that come with some worrying plant" (p.360)
• "He liked the noise of business and politics, it was an adult reassurance, like the chatter of parents on a night journey, meaningless, fragmentary, and consoling to the sleepy child on the back seat" (p.476)
• (of a porn film) "It was what they were already calling a 'classic', from the days before the antiseptic sheen of rubbers was added to the porn palette" (p.484)
• "a book that he'd lent them and watched filter slowly and unread to the bottom of the pile" (p.491)

The main theme is more to do with appearance and reality: how people deny self-knowledge; how they develop and protect their public face. This climaxes with the media exposé - the only way for some characters that appearance and reality can be made to match.