Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child (Picador)

It is 1913, and handsome, effete young men are spending an endless English summer in the gardens of nice houses writing poetry, much of it to each other.

Stop me if you've heard it all before.

The idyll is brought to a shocking and abrupt halt by the war that didn't actually end all wars and many of these poets, athletes and charmers who were the cream of their generation are killed. Alan Hollinghurst's novel centres on Cecil Valance, not quite a first division war poet but one whose poem, Two Acres, becomes an anthology piece. And then the poem and the reputation of the poet are traced through the rest of the twentieth century.

By the end, Paul Bryant, has added a few more titles of controversial literary biography to the life of Valance that he began his career with.

In five chronological sections, the book threads together a number of themes which might be the nostalgia for the lost pre-war England, a history of homosexuality developing from furtive opportunism to civil ceremonies, a satire or examination of the curious shark tank of the literary biography industry and all along it is a beautifully observed comedy of manners, as when Paul is reviewing books for the TLS and searching through newly-arrived titles for potentially 'gay' material,

Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn't quite gay enough.

Hollinghurst's writing is as ever disciplined and understated but flawless and such prose is almost worth reading for its own sake. It might seem at first to be missing a climax, a big revelation, but, if anything, the big bang is near the start and the rest of the book is its echo. As such, making any interpretation of the title, one only ties up a phrase in the Valance poem with a much later detail that Bryant's father was 'unknown'. But, with Hollinghurst's method being both comic and at times satirical, one wonders if there are any characters one likes here, and then in any of his previous books either. Although his understanding of them is deep, his characters can be shallow as in self-regarding, hedonistic or envious.

It's 'cool' in the detached, studied sense of the word, a masterpiece at what it does but pitched one or two notches below the drama of The Line of Beauty or our expectations of any book or adaptation these days. It doesn't work against it for me but an occasion such as the 'new Hollinghurst' needs to be appreciated as a masterclass of prose style, a slow burn and perhaps even something anachronistic to many people by now. I didn't think the Booker Prize committee would need to meet when this book is up for consideration but perhaps now they had better just drop into the same pub to make sure and give it the nod. There is unlikely to be a better written book or a better conceived one but they might just want to make sure it wasn't just that bit too self-conscious and discreet.