Ire at the populism of last year’s Man Booker shortlist focused on the neglect of this saga about a middle-class family’s encounter with a poet killed in the First World War. It begins in the summer of 1913, when George Sawle brings home from Cambridge his aristocratic friend (and lover) Cecil Valance — who promptly seduces George’s younger sister. The narrative then leaps between decades to trace Cecil’s literary afterlife and three generations of Sawles, eliminating characters and introducing new ones without signposting the interim changes.
It trusts you to be intelligent or at least patient: much of the pathos and humour lies in the slow release of detail that owes its interest to prior events. Readers familiar with Alan Hollinghurst’s previous work may be surprised at the novel’s sense of decorum, as more than one clandestine rendezvous climaxes in a curt switch of camera angle (“for 20 minutes the world belonged to the birds”). Yet innuendo bubblesbeneath the surface: someone is said to have been “full of Cecil”, to which an ex-lover grudgingly remarks: “Wasn’t he just.”
Hollinghurst cultivates an atmosphere rich in irony, with delicate shifts in point of view, often from one sentence to the next. He is especially good on shame and envy, emotions that characterise Paul Bryant, the clerk-turned-biographer who takes centre stage in the postwar segment. At first sympathetic to his ambition, the novel turns scornful as he seeks to build a career on dirt about Cecil’s sex life — in particular the question of whether he sired a child that redrew the Sawle family tree.
Booker or no, The Stranger’s Child is treasure: few contemporary novels show equal care at the level of structure and line. Sex, war, class, literature, Englishness — little is untouched as it sweeps the 20th century. What better to read over the Jubilee?
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, 576pp £8.99. To buy this book for £8.54 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134