Somerset Maugham Award<\/a> in 1988 and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989.\u00a0 Next came The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize and was made into a BBC mini-series.<\/p>\nNow we have another magnificent, complex, multi-layered novel, The Stranger\u2019s Child.\u00a0 The title comes from a line in a Tennyson poem, \u201cUnwatch\u2019d, the garden bough shall sway,\u201d read aloud by the young poet Cecil Valance during his first visit to the middle-class home, Two Acres, of his boyfriend George Sawle. The key line is \u201cAnd year by year the landscape grow [sic] Familiar to the stranger\u2019s child.\u201d\u00a0 The reader assumes the stranger to be Cecil, and the child refers to one of the novel\u2019s enduring mysteries.<\/p>\n
This is a historical mystery novel in reverse, designed for readers who like to sneak to the end of a novel to see how it ends. Most of the facts are in the opening section, just before World War I, when George invites Cecil, a member of the landed gentry and heir to an enormous estate complete with an ugly Victorian manor house, for a weekend at his much more modest home.\u00a0 These two young men, both undergraduates at Cambridge University, are engaged in a passionate love, or perhaps more accurate, sex affair.<\/p>\n
Daphne, George\u2019s younger sister, falls madly in love with Cecil, who flirts with both her and the young male servant who cares for him. On his departure Cecil writes what will become one of his most famous poems, \u201cTwo Acres,\u201d in her autograph book.\u00a0 After he goes off to war, he stays in touch with George and Daphne, and Daphne visits him, on leave in London, just before he is killed.<\/p>\n
Did Daphne get pregnant with her first Child, Corinna?\u00a0 That\u2019s the mystery that pervades the novel. Hollinghurst\u2019s narrative follows Daphne\u2019s marriage to Cecil\u2019s younger brother Dudley and their divorce when Daphne runs off with the gay artist Revel Ralph before her third and final marriage.<\/p>\n
Each of the novel\u2019s five parts, set a generation apart, introduces a new character, requiring the reader to learn the character\u2019s relationship with previous characters, and each generation focuses on sorting out the true story of Cecil and his affairs.\u00a0 In the third section, gay Paul Bryant has just begun working in a bank managed by Leslie Keeping, Corinna\u2019s husband.\u00a0 Keeping suffers agoraphobia from the war and can\u2019t bear to be alone; Paul meets others in the family, including Daphne, when he walks Keepinig home.\u00a0 In the fourth section, Paul has left the bank and becomes a biographer, determined to uncover the Cecil\u2019s mysteries of Cecil.\u00a0 In the last section, set in 2008, Paul reveals the family\u2019s secrets, including Corinna\u2019s paternity.<\/p>\n
I found the novel to be engrossing. Although much is revealed in the early pages, there are gaps, and the story becomes the efforts of succeeding generations to find the truth.<\/p>\n
Any fan of LGBT historical mystery fiction will want to read it, and any library collecting serious British fiction must have this book. It\u2019s a masterpiece.<\/p>\n
Reviewer: James Doig Anderson<\/strong>, Professor Emeritus<\/p>\nLibrary and Information Science<\/p>\n
Rutgers University<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alan Hollinghurst. The Stranger\u2019s Child. Knopf, 2011. Hardback. 435p. $27.95. 978-0-307-27276-8. Alan Hollinghurst is one of Britain\u2019s most prominent writers and the most famous gay writer, like Edmund White and Felice Picano rolled into one.\u00a0 He burst upon the scene with his Swimming Pool Library, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glbtrt.ala.org\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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