I'm well over halfway through Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker prizewinner, and it's easy to see why it received the accolade. Always an interesting writer, Hollinghurst here surpasses anything he's ever done. Wrapped around a simple concept—the effect through the ages a Rupert Brooke-like Cambridge poet's verses about an upper middle-class family has on an expanding number of people—the novel drags the reader willingly into the unfolding complications. The poem's effects ripple outward like splash rings in a pool. The beautifully drawn characters act and react according to their varied natures, but they all remain interestingly unpredictable…in the manner of real human beings.
There is the inherent advantage of nostalgia in seeing characters at different stages of their lives, and places at later times, and Hollinghurst makes the most of it. The story starts before the Great War with wealthy Cecil Valance—the poet—and his lover George, younger son of the family which owns "Two Acres," the house featured in the poem. Their sexual encounters are explicit but never graphic, and fraught with being observed by George's young sister, Daphne. Unaware of Cecil's true nature, she sets her teenage heart at the handsome poet, and it is in her autograph book that he writes the poem that resounds throughout the rest of the novel. In the second part, Cecil is a dead war hero, George is approaching a tediously married middle age, and Daphne has married Dudley, Cecil's overshadowed brother. And the intertwined complexities develop…
The time switches are cleverly handled, leaving you in ignorance for pages of exactly who is whom, especially when Daphne has remarried twice and changed surnames, and when her daughter, also married, is introduced as Mrs._____. Some might find the device an irritant, but in fact it allows you to settle into the new situations and characters before re-engaging with the aged people you know from the previous part. There is a sense of accomplishment in playing detective for a few pages until everything resolves naturally into the continuing narrative.
Hollinghurst's prose and dialog are lucent, languid, and snappy by turns. His character's voices are convincing and compelling—he writes the interior monologues of younger and older women as well as those of the men. Daphne's seven-year-old son Wilfred is a particular delight of petulance, uncertainty, and insistence, and has a child's uninformed awareness of the sexual tensions that abound on every page.
The Stranger's Child is a warm, funny, sad, and ultimately rewarding book.
