Alan
Hollinghurst – The Stranger's Child
In the first of her Richard
Ellmann memorial lectures delivered at Emory University in 1999
(published in On Histories and Stories), A.S. Byatt reflects
that “[o]ne very powerful impulse towards the writing of historical
novels has been the political desire to write the histories of the
marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded..”; and this
observation assonates with one of the principal themes of Alan
Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child – its solicitude
for the buried life, the generations of men who were compelled to
conceal or deny their sexuality, the unrecapturability of historical
truth.
The minor poet Cecil Valance
spends a weekend at the family home of his friend George Sawle.
Valance composes a poem based on the visit – 'Two Acres' – a
fairly mediocre pastoral elegy which will become an anthology staple
(inscribing it in the autograph album of George's sister Daphne).
The two undergraduates covertly engage in sexual by-play, while
Daphne, sixteen and starstruck, nourishes an infatuation for the
poet. The Sawles are a touch déclassé,
and Valance descends on them with all the condescension and mystique
afforded by his own aristocratic background. He appears only in this
first section of the book: slain in the Great War, his literary
immortality is assured – and it's the after-life of his reputation
that forms the motor of the novel. His life and work become a site
of contention, for those who knew him and those – biographers and
scholars – who didn't. The visions and revisions of the successor
generation (the 'stranger's child' of Tennyson's In
Memoriam – unknown
inheritors) run athwart the mute ravening of time. And –
challengingly, frustratingly – the novel's structure enacts these
displacements: divided into five sections, its plot doesn't proceed
in smooth linear fashion; rather, each part sets us at a point
perhaps many years later, where it often isn't clear what has
occurred to the characters in the interim. (Between Parts One and
Two, for example, Valance has been killed; between Two and Three, the
Sawle children have grown into late middle age, their lives in the
meantime only faintly hinted at.)
Latterly
we follow the attempts of Paul Bryant, a young bank clerk, to piece
together Valance's biography; braided with his erotic dalliance with
a schoolmaster Peter Rowe, someone else with a concern in Valance's
posthumous fame. Characters earlier introduced rematerialise, but
diminished, somehow: and it's this unaccountable reluctance on
Hollinghurst's part to give them their narrative due that hobbles The
Stranger's Child. Scenes from the childhood of the Valance
children – Corinna and Wilkins – are drawn with brilliant
intensity, lit from within: but, when both reappear decades later,
they are soured, broken and barren: with Hollinghurst offering no
clue as to why they might have been alloted this fate. (It makes no
sense humanly speaking; nor formally and creatively.) Paul Bryant is
tiresome and priggish – but occupies a significant stretch of the
novel's middle passage – we spend time with him in the reasonable
expectation of some pay-off, of one of the conventional deliverances
of narrative fiction. Yet he too slips below the story's horizon,
and we glimpse him once more, in the final chapters, after a
furlough, a bluff, bloated beneficiary of the Valance legacy, where
he stands betrayed as an exploitative cynic for his own careerist
ends. For a novel that stakes its authority and fidelity on the
tender, patient delicate restoration of lost lives, it seems
perverse that its characters should be so carelessly deposited in the
landscape of the novel. Hollinghurst writes exquisite, lambent
sentences with Jamesian finesse: and this evidently licenses him to
feel that he can press his characters into the service of prose style
alone; as if secretly he longed to dispense with the heavy
obligations of the classic realist novel, yet feared – given the
emotional reserve he so prizes, the controlled rage for order –
the lawlessness of the experimental.