The Stranger's Child

Oct 27, 2012 Paul marked it as assorted-rants-about-stuff · review of another edition

GOODREADS REVIEWER TO SUE BOOKER PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR

- Associated Press, 23 May 2012

"I am appalled," says Goodreads reviewer Paul Bryant, speaking at his pleasant Nottingham home earlier today. "Friends had told me of this but I had brushed it aside as a matter below my concern. But then I stumbled upon an article in the Guardian and after reading that the bottom just fell out of my world. I will have to sue Alan Hollinghurst for damages now."

The article in question, entitled "The Booker can Driv...more

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Apr 11, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: Booker Longlisted 2011

Shelves: booker, historical-fiction, poetry, drama

Reading The Stranger's Child is like visiting a multi-leveled beautiful museum with each level dedicated to showcase a certain period in a nation's history.

Oh I still remember the delight and mixed feelings that I had when I visited the Auckland Museum in 2002. The ground floor houses the Maori and early settlers' artifacts, plants and faunas exclusively found in New Zealand. The second floor houses the WWI (where the NZ government sent delegations to Europe) and the different battles around th...more Reading The Stranger's Child is like visiting a multi-leveled beautiful museum with each level dedicated to showcase a certain period in a nation's history.

Oh I still remember the delight and mixed feelings that I had when I visited the Auckland Museum in 2002. The ground floor houses the Maori and early settlers' artifacts, plants and faunas exclusively found in New Zealand. The second floor houses the WWI (where the NZ government sent delegations to Europe) and the different battles around that time. The third floor houses the WWII history including the unforgettable corner on the Holocaust. I almost cried listening, with concentration camp artifacts surrounding me, to the taped testimonies of Holocaust survivors. NZ was not directly part of Hitler's invasion but NZ, just like its neighboring sister Australia, shares a lot of culture with Europe. There were even people who flee Nazi soldiers by taking a boat to New Zealand.

That was the first time I've been to a big preeminent museum so it was a memorable visit and I was even almost alone in a that huge building for the whole day!!!

The reason why I likened this book, my second by Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child to this museum is the fact that the plot runs through a three generations at different particular years in their lives. It starts in the 1920's and ends in the 2008. The switch from one part to another could be jarring, at least for me. Starting each part is like to reading a new book with half of the characters new and the previous ones are older. Jarring because you tend to guess what happened in between and why is it focused on that year. Then you read on and get settled. But Hollinghurst ends that year and you have to go to the next distant year and you have to repeat the same experience.

However, the unseen thread, i.e., the theme, that unifies the whole book, is revealed in the end and it tied down the whole structure quite niftily. It's just that I wanted more. I wanted the story to have another year, say 2010's. I got attuned to Hollinghurst's tempo and trick and I wanted more.

I read some reviews though and I agree that while reading this book, if you have read some of the good British fictions, you will see some similarities about some parts of this book to what have already been written. I had a feeling at some points in my reading that Hollinghurst was craving for another Booker award so he concocted this book by incorporating what worked before in other Booker-winning works/English masterpieces:

One of the best English novels Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - for the two gay men and one innocent girl spending one summer's day in an English estate;

1989 Booker Winner Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - for the book's main message (my interpretation).

1990 Booker Winner Possession by A. S. Byatt - the poet as a character that unifies -as a backdraft - the whole story that runs through at least two generations;

2001 Booker Shortlisted Atonement by Ian McEwan - for the secret that was kept and revealed later;

2009 Booker Shortlisted The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt - the English family or families that grow from being young or children to adults to grandparents.

I am not a novelist, in fact I haven't really tried writing yet. However, I admired Hollinghurt's The Line of Beauty and I gave it a 4-star rating here on Goodreads. But this book, The Stranger's Child for me seems to be written by him with another Booker as a target. I am not saying that it is not a good objective but it somehow compromised the whole appeal of the book. It's like an artist making a masterpiece statue getting the eyes of Venus, the smile of Mona Lisa, the lips of Angelina Jolie, the behind of Jennifer Lopez, the legs of Britney Spears and the bosom of Paris Hilton.

But the book has a huge scope, multiple layers, several story lines that can stand as separate books or short stories, many memorable characters and the writing is flawless. In the end, Hollinghurst delivered again.

It's just too big to fail. Too imposing not to notice. Too beautiful not to like.

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Apr 05, 2013 Cecily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction

This tells a riveting and complex saga with profound insight, plenty of intrigue and dashes of wit. From the first dozen pages, even the first few sentences, I was drawn into a love affair with the writing of this book. I read large chunks more than once because the writing is breathtaking, but leisurely: I wanted to capture the craft and jot down many quotes (see the end of this for a long selection).

Having finished, I still love it, even though the quality was not quite maintained. It is a st...more

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Dec 16, 2012 William rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: uk, fiction, 21-ce, signed

Hollinghurst is fifty and he's still writing about boys and their capacity for stratospheric ejaculation. Zzz-ville.

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Nov 02, 2011 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ficciones, great-war, shouldreread

In a perverse delectation of delay I waited until the US release of The Stranger’s Child. In spells of impatience I would Google the UK reviews, and read them in a skimming, self-protective way, veering from spoilers, and keeping mostly to the opening and closing paragraphs of generalized acclaim. From review to review the memes were Brideshead Revisited (there’s an estate), Atonement (there’s a naïve young girl), and the extent of the novel’s ambition. I can say nothing about the alleged Waugh...more

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Jul 22, 2012 Mkeirsbi rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: r-52-books

Last week I read Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. And boy, what an ordeal this has been. The whole novel just didn't appeal to me. It started out as some sort of Wuthering Heights spin-off, but with a gay twist to it. One of the lovers heroically dies in war, and becomes a well-known poet. The rest of the story is more or less a quest of remembering the dead poet. Throughout the twentieth century people start to take an interest in the poet, and even a biography is being set up. The rel...more Last week I read Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. And boy, what an ordeal this has been. The whole novel just didn't appeal to me. It started out as some sort of Wuthering Heights spin-off, but with a gay twist to it. One of the lovers heroically dies in war, and becomes a well-known poet. The rest of the story is more or less a quest of remembering the dead poet. Throughout the twentieth century people start to take an interest in the poet, and even a biography is being set up. The relationships between the characters start to echo the relationships between the nineteenth century characters at the beginning of the novel. And lo and behold... It even results in a new gay relationship. A relationship that was forecasted by the relation between the poet and his lover. So, with some good will, you might read the novel as an alternative, gay, history of England. And although that might have its merits, it just didn't appeal to me. Firstly, I do like coming-of-age stories, but I don't like plain moral or sentimental drama. To me, that particular genre has gotten old after Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Perhaps it's because as a man, I lack the finesse to grasp the subtle stabs at the human condition, but to me it's just boring.
So, I usually keep away from novels like that. But Hollinghurst's novel came critically acclaimed and applauded for its wit and stirring narrative. So I caved, though I should've known better.
The narrative is simply grinding to a halt after the first chapter. The first chapter didn't quite appeal to me as well, but I did have the feeling it was going somewhere. Yet, it just came to a halt after the first chapter and the poets death. So nothing stirring there. In fact, I couldn't find one aspect of suspense in the entire novel. Really disappointing. And wit and funny? I haven't chuckled once throughout the entire novel. It just completely missed its mark, as far as I'm concerned.
The only redeeming feature is Hollinghurst's prose. He does know how to write. His sentences are well-balanced and properly paced. On the syntax-level, this book is very well written. That's the only reason I found the stamina to push through and read the novel. Otherwise I'd given up after chapter 2.
But it has been an eye-opener. I really ought to steer away from novels like this, no matter how critically acclaimed they come. These novels are just not my cup of tea.(less)

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Sep 13, 2011 Blair rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-prize, past-and-present, read-on-kindle

The only other Alan Hollinghurst book I've read is the beautiful but disturbing Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty, which, from what I can gather, is typical of his work. The Stranger's Child, then, is a departure: while homosexuality and gay relationships are a strong theme throughout the book, it is a family saga spanning almost a hundred years - stretching from the eve of the First World War to the present day - and is the first Hollinghurst novel to feature major female characters. Divid...more The only other Alan Hollinghurst book I've read is the beautiful but disturbing Booker Prize winner The Line of Beauty, which, from what I can gather, is typical of his work. The Stranger's Child, then, is a departure: while homosexuality and gay relationships are a strong theme throughout the book, it is a family saga spanning almost a hundred years - stretching from the eve of the First World War to the present day - and is the first Hollinghurst novel to feature major female characters. Divided into five parts, the book follows several generations of the Sawle and Valance families. Cecil Valance - first introduced as the young lover of George Sawle - is the central figure of The Stranger's Child; a bisexual poet and aesthete, he achieves fame - and creates an impact which will resonate throughout history - with a poem titled "Two Acres", ostensibly a message of ardour directed at George's teeenage sister, Daphne. Daphne is the secondary protagonist, and while Cecil remains frozen in time as an increasingly mythical figure, we follow her through youthful infatuation, marriage, motherhood, family life and old age. Later, a younger character is introduced: Paul Bryant, an aspiring writer whose obsession with Cecil and the two families' entwined histories leads him to pen a speculative, sensational (and in fact remarkably accurate) biography.

I initially found it quite difficult to adapt to the narrative jumps between generations. After the opening, which I instantly loved, I struggled to get used to the second section. But by the time this ended, I had become so involved that I hated the next skip forward in time. However, by the end I was glad this device had been used; to see the impact of these characters on their descendants near to a century later gives the story a uniquely insightful feel. You really get the sense not only that you've genuinely known these people, but that you've travelled through time to see how the echoes of their thoughts, feelings and actions have reverberated down the years. Hollinghurst is clearly a fan of keeping the reader guessing - each of the sections opens in such a way that makes everything a complete mystery at first, with the truth gradually revealed; there are some witty red herrings in the narrative too, and the dates of each event are never actually given, just subtly implied through cultural changes, topics of conversation, the characters' manners and clothes.

Because the story takes leaps through time, it's impossible for me to discuss the plot in any detail without giving away significant spoilers - so I won't. However, I do really want to talk about how much I loved the party scene in the second section of the book. It's an absolute masterclass in writing; I actually don't understand how Hollinghurst managed to write it in such a way, as if you are there with the characters as they move from room to room, in the thick of the action, experiencing the confusion of drunken fragments of conversation and the disorientation caused by interaction between a number of people with disparate goals and desires. It's breathtakingly filmic and one of the most impressive and memorable scenes I have read in any book in recent memory. Surely, surely, a television adaptation of this novel must already have been mooted. Fans of Downton Abbey and the like would absolutely lap it up.

This was a slow, leisurely read rather than a compulsive one, but for all that I enjoyed it immensely. I was immediately drawn in by the first two sections, which bear what I'm sure is a deliberate resemblance to Brideshead Revisited; the period, the relationship between George and Cecil, the significance of the two families' houses ("Two Acres" and Corley Court, the latter clearly the book's Brideshead). I thought the book sagged in the middle somewhat, and the introduction of Paul was troublesome - he isn't likeable, though this is necessary for his character to work - but the plot gained momentum in the last few chapters and I found myself captivated by Paul's race to uncover the 'truth'. The short final section wrapped things up neatly - I enjoyed the fact that we see members of yet another new generation still obsessed by Cecil, suggesting that this will always continue while the man himself will remain an unknowable enigma. Therefore, the ending itself, in which (view spoiler), seems a fitting conclusion even as it is a little frustrating. I didn't want the book to end, and I wished more time could have been spent on the final section - I understand that Paul's introduction was necessary as a bridge between the generations, but I think it could have been done with more brevity.

It's a real shame The Stranger's Child was excluded from this year's Booker shortlist, and I can't help but feel it's been snubbed precisely because it seemed like such an obvious choice. Though both were very good and neither perfect, I think The Stranger's Child has the edge over The Line of Beauty; its scope and ambition make it both more appealing and more resonant. I didn't fall head over heels in love with the book, but nevertheless, I believe it's worth the hype.(less)

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Dec 26, 2011 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Chris by: Shelf Awareness

Shelves: 2011-reads, best-of-2011

When I finished this novel, I just sat for five minutes, thinking of where this story had taken me in past week. This was long-listed for the 2011 Booker Prize, and why it didn’t get on the short list and then win, I won’t know. (But I may, next up is the winner, “The Sense of a Ending.”) Hollinghurst has won the award before, but his latest effort is an incredible story of love, loyalty, and the art of poetry (and much, much more). And it has ended at the top of my 2011 Best Of list just in the...more When I finished this novel, I just sat for five minutes, thinking of where this story had taken me in past week. This was long-listed for the 2011 Booker Prize, and why it didn’t get on the short list and then win, I won’t know. (But I may, next up is the winner, “The Sense of a Ending.”) Hollinghurst has won the award before, but his latest effort is an incredible story of love, loyalty, and the art of poetry (and much, much more). And it has ended at the top of my 2011 Best Of list just in the nick of time!

When it began, I felt like it was a mashup between two of my favorites, “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited.” That soon changed. It begins in 1913, pre-World War I and ends in 2008, when people are using iPhones and civil partnerships are legal in England. Throughout the five sections, skipping decades, the one person that is constant is the poet Cecil Valance.

Hollinghurst has a writer’s technique (and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this before), of plopping his reader into the new part (scene) each time. I had to keep a small piece of paper with me to identify who is who; while we had met most of these people before, everyone is older, names have changed due to marriage, etc. I felt like a detective, “aha, that was little Corrina!” as he gradually re-introduced these characters to his readers. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well, but I frequently wondered how he was going to tie the current story to the previous section and he always made it work. Bravo! And of course, halfway through, the armchair psychologist in me wondered, who IS the stranger’s child? Who is the stranger? Who is the child? The answer may be in Part 5, but do we ever really know?

Hollinghurst was a new author to me; actually, I’ve never even heard of him, but I can’t wait to read his other books, one in particular that has come highly recommended. This winter, if you want to get totally engrossed in a story that captivates and takes you away from your life for just a little while, this is just the book!
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Oct 11, 2011 Ruth rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

c2011. Oh dear - this book has made me feel rather staid and narrow minded and I just did not enjoy it at all. I should have - its essentially a saga of sorts covering some of my favourite periods of history - but ugh! The first section of the book dealing with "Two Acres" went really well but from then on there just seemed to be rather a lot of meaningless dialogue with the brain having to scramble around to remember who was who and when. In a way, it reminded me a lot of a talkative Brideshead...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Jeffrey rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wish I'd been a stranger to buying this...

This is one of our finest writers. He has an ability to present prose and observation with such elegance and deserves his place on the shelves.

Not with this one, though.

This starts out so well...the idea of a WW1 poet is engaging and the place and time and the characters draw you in and it's wonderful...and then you see you're 18% through and you think...what? More? The book then rambles on and I turned over page after page of prose that could have been...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Lucia Gannon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Stranger's Child tracks the fortunes of the Sawle and Valance families through 3 generations, from 1913 to 2009. Best described as a saga, it begins as a historical novel and ends as contemporary fiction.
One memorable weekend in 1913, a young poet, Cecil Valance visits his friend, George Sawle at the Sawle family home of “Two Acres”, where George lives with his mother, his 16 year old sister, Daphne and their 25, or is it 35, servants.
Cecil writes a poem for Daphne, or is it George, or perha...more

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Nov 05, 2011 Djrmel rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: z2011-read, historical-fiction, fiction

Hollinghurst's ability to immerse a reader in time and place is all that kept me going to the end of this book. The selective omniscient point of view is used to drag out scenes that go nowhere while plot lines that might have been interesting (How did Jonah end up working for Harry Hewitt?) are teased and then dropped. There's also a tantalizing theme, almost buried in the soap opera passing as history plot, about how facts are only as factual as the person reporting them.

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Feb 08, 2012 Gena rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My enjoyment of the first two sections of this novel was tinged by the suspicion that I was merely indulging in some Merchant Ivory–caliber WWI-era nostalgia—a suspicion perhaps fed by my having read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the novel in the NYRB before reading the novel itself. In the end, however, the book comes through as a worthy offering from one of the best British novelists currently writing, although it didn't strike me with quite the force of The Line of Beauty.

Hollinghurst has be...more My enjoyment of the first two sections of this novel was tinged by the suspicion that I was merely indulging in some Merchant Ivory–caliber WWI-era nostalgia—a suspicion perhaps fed by my having read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the novel in the NYRB before reading the novel itself. In the end, however, the book comes through as a worthy offering from one of the best British novelists currently writing, although it didn't strike me with quite the force of The Line of Beauty.

Hollinghurst has been described as a social satirist, but this novel is more of a meditation on cultural memory and technologies of memorialization. In fact, it completely undermines whatever structures of nostalgia it seems to introduce early on by suggesting repeatedly and unrelentingly that all of our monuments to notions of "past greatness"—whether actual monuments, or written remembrances, or just casually fond memories—are at heart distorted reproductions of previous generations' trite crap. The nature of the distortion varies wildly, some of it politically or psychologically motivated, some of it conventional, some of it just the formal reality of how memory works, but what is consistent in Hollinghurst's vision is the diminishing return of the memorialized object itself as various kinds of cultural work go into preserving it.

Cecil Valance, the novel's primary object of memory, is an aristocratic poet who dies young in the Great War, crossing over into an unlikely, extended cultural afterlife fed by generational waves of investment: upper-class self-preservational strategies (the gaudy marble tomb in the estate's chapel), the tabloid appeal of high-society memoirs, various academic projects ranging from annotated collections of letters to "recuperative" queer biographies. No mode of remembering Cecil, from his mother's desperate seances in the library to his biographer's earnest attempts to decode his cryptic sex life, is allowed to be any more accurate or less absurd than any other. This is largely because Cecil himself, whom we meet in Part 1, is (as mediated by the novel itself, and not the 20th-century it represents) hardly worth remembering—a young man more charisma than substance, who dabbled, with all the arrogance and flightiness of a young nobleman, in flirtation, seduction, and poetry, all to little consequence. (The one remembrance of Cecil that comes to the fore as perhaps more apt than all the rest is his senile former (secret) lover's bright exclamation, during an interview with a biographer, that "he had an enormous cock.")

Ultimately, the novel risks a kind of cynical hollowness as it leaves one wondering whether anything is worth remembering at all. No form of memory prevails over any other—paper documents are as fallible as iPhone text messages in preserving personalities and relationships, which aren't very interesting to begin with; great houses are ugly and uncomfortable in their prime, and become only more so through "improvement" or decay; literary and academic homages are revealed to be equally misguided both in their choices of object and the significance they assign to themselves as keepers of those objects. What we call cultural inheritance—or, more colloquially, just "history" or "the past"—is exposed a a sad accumulation of things made to bear more weight than they can with any real dignity. This sense is captured in a description of the house one of the characters lives in as an old woman, from the perspective of a younger visitor: "All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines." The "worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent" is the novel's predominant impression.

At the very end, though, I wondered if the novel was offering a kind of lifeline in the face of its own cynicism: a small collection of amusingly bad letters marginal to the Cecil Valance narrative emerges, documenting in a surprisingly moving way the awkward, illiterate maneuvers of a more thoroughly forgettable young man as he tries to avoid the sexual advances of an older neighbor without violating the laws of gratitude and bonhomie governing upper-class homosocial propriety. Though there is some suggestion that this document, too, can and will be put to the same absurd uses as any other bit of cultural detritus, for a moment it does seem paradoxically to capture something not ridiculous—evidence of the beauty of humanity flaring up unexpectedly in the most unlikely of specimens.(less)

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Feb 29, 2012 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

While I was quick to deliver a three-star rating to this novel, I could consider dropping another star. Perhaps my biggest issue with this novel is that I did enjoy it...when Forster wrote it nearly a century ago in "Maurice" and then when Waugh wrote it in "Brideshead". I've always been hesitant of contemporary literature for this exact reason: it's too derivative. Much of the turn-of-the-century English literature aesthetic over saturates this novel, and while I do very much enjoy that setting...more

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Aug 22, 2012 David Hallman rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Alan Hollinghurst Shines Again

I don’t know what the 2011 Man Booker Prize jury was smoking when they ignored Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” and selected instead Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” I’ve already vented my disappointment with the Barnes book in my review of it. I’m here now to praise Hollinghurst’s novel which I finished reading this afternoon.

There are so many things I adore about “The Stranger’s Child.”

Hollinghurst has such an elegant writing style. His descrip...more Alan Hollinghurst Shines Again

I don’t know what the 2011 Man Booker Prize jury was smoking when they ignored Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” and selected instead Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” I’ve already vented my disappointment with the Barnes book in my review of it. I’m here now to praise Hollinghurst’s novel which I finished reading this afternoon.

There are so many things I adore about “The Stranger’s Child.”

Hollinghurst has such an elegant writing style. His descriptive sentences, some of them of almost Proustian length, never distracted me from the narration but rather carried me along with unselfconscious simplicity so that only in retrospect did I become aware of their complexity.

I found the storyline equal parts mystery, historical texturing, character study, and relationship drama. With an effortlessness that echoes his writing style, the story unfolds delicately and inexorably. I always wanted to know what would happen next but was never once tempted to skip or skim ahead—such was my enjoyment of the read, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

I do have two quibbles that I expect will evaporate on a second read and probably reflect more my problem than any inadequacy in Hollinghurst’s writing. The story is told through the eyes of various of the characters depending on the historical period of the sections. I was so thoroughly drawn into their particular viewpoint it was as if the narrative were written in the first person. I then found myself jarred when we were suddenly seeing the world through the eyes of another person. Secondly, and related, the last section caught me quite off-guard as our principle narrator of what had preceded it was being assessed, judgmentally, by others who had abruptly become our accompaniers.

Nevertheless, I strongly recommend “The Stranger’s Child.” I have read almost everything else that Alan Hollinhurst has published including the stunning “Line of Beauty” which won the 2004 Man Booker (the jury was on their toes that year.) I will reread “The Stranger’s Child” again down the road and will surely savor it at least as much as on the first occasion.

* * *
Information on Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" at http://amzn.to/R13DOk

For information on my memoir "August Farewell" and my novel "Searching for Gilead", see my website at http://DavidGHallman.com (less)

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Aug 27, 2011 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Loved it. Sprawling story spanning the years between 1913 and 2008. Shades of both Howard's End and Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library. His best book to date.

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Feb 26, 2013 Ayelet Waldman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is so complicated and ambitious, so dense and luscious. And it inspired me to come up with a new novel, which I've been trying to do for two months!

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May 15, 2013 Ian Mapp rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit-fict

I think I am yet to see a more impressive set of recommendations on the inside of this book. Pages and Pages of reasons why I should read it and why it should have won the Man Booker Prize.

And it is impressive.

Almost five books in one - its starts as a "country house" novel at the turn of the century and just before the first war. A family friend, Cecil the poet, comes to stay. He writes one of his more famous pieces, named after the house and spends the rest of the time trying to seduce man, wo...more

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May 02, 2013 Kathleen Hagen added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-audio

The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst,Narrated by James Daniel Wilson, Produced by Random House Audio, Downloaded from audible.com.

This is a saga spanning almost a century. It begins in 1913 when George Sawle brings his Cambridge school mate, Cecil Valance, home with him. George and Cecil sneak around having an affair even at their house on the weekend. But Cecil also flirts with George’s young 15-year-old sister, Daphne, and she becomes attracted to him as well. Cecil writes to both brothe...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Snort rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“Dear Cecil aroused keen feelings in many of those who crossed his path”, and so he did. Even more so, Cecil dies young in his prime, and thus becomes the stuff of lore, while his poem is immortalized in legend. One would love to imagine the young Adonis(es) growing more beautiful and distinguished with age - but we are treated to a crumbling George, who of course, in retrospect, is only beautiful by association and in reflected glory.

While I care less for the later chapters and characters, I a...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Andrea Broomfield rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stranger's Child is a novel about the consequences and the faults of memory, where through the narrative structure, readers are allowed to see the faults and consequences clearly, and to feel at times the frustration of not being able to leap into the story to correct, elaborate, or collude with the characters as they piece together a slowly disintegrating history.

The novel is indeed slow and careful--it rather plods along, as other reviewers have mentioned--but that pace strikes me as a British...more Stranger's Child is a novel about the consequences and the faults of memory, where through the narrative structure, readers are allowed to see the faults and consequences clearly, and to feel at times the frustration of not being able to leap into the story to correct, elaborate, or collude with the characters as they piece together a slowly disintegrating history.

The novel is indeed slow and careful--it rather plods along, as other reviewers have mentioned--but that pace strikes me as a British pace. As I read Stranger's Child, I was reminded of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and The Glittering Prizes by Frederic Rapheal. At times with such novels, plot takes a back seat to characterization and characters' interior lives, but it is within those interiors that the essence of the art resides, not in drama or conflict or even resolution.

Stranger's Child also reminds me of A.S. Byatt's Posession, where contemporary characters work to piece together the past of two Victorian characters who were famous poets and secret lovers. The back and forth between the present and the past, and the importance of writing, particularly letters and poems, stand out as major themes in both Stranger's Child and Possession.

Hollinghurst makes it difficult for readers to remember all of the characters, the locales, and the connections between them, and I think it might be because he wishes for readers to feel acutely the frustration of forgetting, as do the characters themselves. Paul Bryant is determined to prove that Cecil Valance was in love with Daphne Sawle's brother, George, and not Daphne, and thus, he prods the memories of those involved. Some of their memory lapses frustrate Paul, just as the readers' own memory lapses likely frustrate them, too, as they flip back through pages attempting to remember the entangled family tree. At other times, however, and these moments are more important, Paul probes his informants callously, and they detest his callousness and his determination to mine their memories for information to make his own case--and fortune. The scenes where Paul is interviewing the now elderly Daphne Jacobs are tortuous, as readers want very much for Daphne to thwart and evade Paul's probing--and she does. No matter what Paul ultimately publishes about her relationship (or lack thereof) with Cecil Valance, Daphne, I think, triumphs over Paul. If it is fair to say that English people are by nature intensely private, a character like Paul comes across as particularly unlikable, in spite of the fact that he is valiantly attempting to trace and give a voice to the history of gay men in Edwardian and Georgian society.

The slow decay of the aristocracy, of the landed estates, of homes on two or twenty-thousand acres, are obvious themes in this beautiful novel, and I appreciate those themes as much as the theme of memory. This novel is a masterful overview of a century of English history, one that I will most certainly reread with pleasure in the near future.(less)

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Jan 27, 2013 June rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Having finally got around to reading and enjoying The Line of Beauty, I thought I'd read another of Hollinghurst's popular novels. I was impressed for a second time, and thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

It was pretty different in some ways (broader themes, sweeping over a whole century), and in others rather familiar (same ground of exploring attitudes to homosexuality). The latter made me think I'd read it too soon after the last one as I found myself feeling a little bored with his agenda on th...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Davie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Stranger's Child is about how versions of events vary from individual to individual and from era to era until the truth of any experience is completely inaccessible, even to those who lived it. As one character observes, even our memories are just memories of memories. For me, a major frustration was that the author never revealed the truth about anything to the reader either, so that I was even more in the dark than the characters, since most of them at least believed that they knew somethi...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Al rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” what starts as a genteel look at England before the Great War evolves into a literary race against time and memory. Picture a wealthy British family a la “Downton Abbey” (but with two sons and a daughter). One son has fallen under the spell of a charismatic fellow Cambridge student, Cecil Valance. Valance dies in WWI, but his poetry lives on, helped by a mention by Churchill. The man and his poetry pique the interest of scholars years later, suspecti...more In Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” what starts as a genteel look at England before the Great War evolves into a literary race against time and memory. Picture a wealthy British family a la “Downton Abbey” (but with two sons and a daughter). One son has fallen under the spell of a charismatic fellow Cambridge student, Cecil Valance. Valance dies in WWI, but his poetry lives on, helped by a mention by Churchill. The man and his poetry pique the interest of scholars years later, suspecting a gay undercurrent. The drive of those scholars to understand the truth about Valance will confound and upset Valance’s family and relatives for years to come. As these family members skew their versions of the past in memoirs and interviews, the scholars struggle to find the truth about Valance before any evidence is lost forever.

Hollinghurst was rightly praised for “Child,” a complex yet satisfying work which appears to have been inspired by two British WWI soldier-poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Hollinghurst skillfully spreads his story over five sections from different decades and points of view, slowly peeling away layers of connected, troubled relationships. A sample of Hollinghurst’s insightful writing:

“He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh.” “It was only after he’d planted the first kiss and committed to the second that her resistance showed, a little bewildered grunt and recoil, as if from the sheer scale of his misunderstanding.” “They were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.”

Ultimately the book is more than just a look at how families try to bury secrets; it raises questions about how weak our reliance on memory really is in reconstructing the past and how challenging it is for biographers to reconstruct lives. Hollinghurst, like he did in “The Object of Beauty,” is especially good at providing an outsider’s perspective on the British upper classes.
“The Stranger’s Child” is a stunning achievement. Highly recommended.
(less)

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Nov 03, 2012 Helen Woods rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved the beginning of this book. The characterisation was great and I wanted to know more about these people. One of the most beautiful things about his writing is the casually precise descriptions of little things which just confirm your thoughts about a character or place.
The other great thing about his writing is his subtle allusions to class - who is accepted and acceptable and who is not. Even though, as the years pass in the book, you realise that the class system is if not crumbling, h...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Jeremy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In 2004 Alan Hollinghurst made literary headlines by winning the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Set in Thatcher’s 1980’s Britain it courted mild controversy with its depictions of cocaine abuse and graphic gay sex. Seven years later The Stranger’s Child made the Man Booker long list and then fell out of contention, which led to bitter complaints from those critics who believe that Hollinghurst is Britain’s greatest living writer.

I approached this book with optimism. I hadn’t...more In 2004 Alan Hollinghurst made literary headlines by winning the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Set in Thatcher’s 1980’s Britain it courted mild controversy with its depictions of cocaine abuse and graphic gay sex. Seven years later The Stranger’s Child made the Man Booker long list and then fell out of contention, which led to bitter complaints from those critics who believe that Hollinghurst is Britain’s greatest living writer.

I approached this book with optimism. I hadn’t read The Line of Beauty but I knew enough to realize that Hollinghust could be an interesting proposition. The novel begins just prior to WWI and finds the sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle reading poetry and awaiting the arrival of her older brother George and his university friend Cecil Valance - a poet from a wealthy family who also happens to be bisexual. Cecil’s impact over the course of his stay is significant; he upsets George’s mother, who suspects the truth of their relationship, causes a servant to marvel at his collection of silken underwear, frolics with George in the woods and flirts with Daphne. Most significantly he writes a poem, supposedly for Daphne, called “Two Acres”, after the name of the Sawles property. After his death in the war Cecil and his poem become immortalized when Winston Churchill quotes from “Two Acres” in a speech.

The events of this first section, just one of five, set the novel up for an exploration of mythmaking, the changing attitudes to homosexuality and the subjective nature of truth. Hollinghurst also devotes a great deal of space to the question of the moral ambiguity of biographers and their trade, particularly during the latter half of the book. Such a concentration of weighty themes seems more than enough to make the novel both entertaining and philosophically intriguing. Disappointingly The Stranger’s Child mostly fails in both regards, although it does have its moments.

The novel’s strengths lay in the way it depicts the evolution of British culture during the twentieth century and how it affected people’s lives. In this regard the scope of the novel is ambitious and does at least move the plot forward. The naiveté and pleasures of the pre war section give way to the bleak post war section, in which Daphne has married Cecil’s brother – Dudley, who is beset by mental problems due to his part in the war. Everyone suffers, including the children, Daphne and an old German woman who comes to an untimely end (a parody of Agatha Christie?). The third and most pleasing section, set in 1967, finds several gay characters, including the future Cecil biographer Paul Bryant, discussing the impending decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. By the novel’s close, set in 2008, everything’s changed and significantly the gay characters are marrying each other and can now live their lives in the open.

Despite the novel’s initial promise and Hollinghurst’s ambition I was quite often utterly bored with The Stranger's Child. Turgid is a good adjective to use. There is simply too much dialogue, with endless boring interactions between characters at parties and dinners. During these extended scenes the characters are regularly nervous to the point of being neurotic. Often they appear to be hamstrung by politeness and therefore never say what they really mean. Hollinghurst is probably making a point about what it is to be English or even human, but unfortunately it happens so often that you begin to tire of it and start to feel that way yourself.

With many of the major events taking place outside of the narrative the plot is stretched thin and therefore there is virtually no tension generated and no real desire to find out what may happen next, or to invest emotionally in the characters. The novel is also overwritten to the point of exhaustion. No character can speak without a description of their facial expression or how they are looking narrowly at another character or off into the middle distance. Hollinghurst’s writing is incredibly detailed, which is sometimes quite startlingly effective, but his obsession with the minutiae of everyday interactions does not make for riveting reading.

As a literary monument to the cultural history of Britain over much of the twentieth century The Stranger's Child succeeds to an extent, but it is ultimately hamstrung by its flaws. As with most books some readers respond well whilst others do not. A handful of my book club members absolutely loved this book, but most either marginally appreciated it or thought that it was too long and tedious. In the end The Stranger’s Child simply made me yearn for the succinct brilliance of Carson McCuller’s writing. Despite Hollinghurst’s fine reputation my advice is to approach this novel with caution, or perhaps not at all. It seems that the judges of the Man Booker prize were right after all.(less)

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Oct 02, 2012 Dan Pearce rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another excellent novel from Hollinghurst- almost as good as The Line Of Beauty. It is the story of a family, friends and lovers, beginning in 1913 and finishing in 2008. The main narrative thread concerns the life and reputation of a fictional war poet, killed in the trenches of WW1. The first of five parts concerns Cecil Valance writing an ambiguous love poem during his stay with the Sawle family. Hollinghurst forensically examines the social mores of society with dry humour and in this aspect...more

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Sep 03, 2012 Harry Rutherford rated it 4 of 5 stars

Hollinghurst's previous book, The Line of Beauty , was one of my favourite novels of the past ten years. Mainly because it was just so beautifully written. So I was looking forward to this coming out in paperback, and was staggered when the Kindle edition went on sale at a paltry 20p. That still seems baffling, TBH.

Anyway, this one didn't blow me away in quite the same way. Partially I'm sure that's because The Line of Beauty took me by surprise, whereas I went into this with high expectations....more

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Sep 02, 2012 Vicki rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: holiday-reading

This book started out with great promise - an intriguing evocation of the subtleties of class, sexuality and the pre-WW1 era - largely presented from the perspectives of two of the younger proponents, 12 year old Daphne and young Jonah. In subsequent sections the narrative perspective shifts rather randomly to others, some whose role or interest is never explained, and the earlier careful characterisation lapses into caricature. The later Daphne is almost indistinguishable from her mother, for e...more This book started out with great promise - an intriguing evocation of the subtleties of class, sexuality and the pre-WW1 era - largely presented from the perspectives of two of the younger proponents, 12 year old Daphne and young Jonah. In subsequent sections the narrative perspective shifts rather randomly to others, some whose role or interest is never explained, and the earlier careful characterisation lapses into caricature. The later Daphne is almost indistinguishable from her mother, for example, and Jonah is only fished out of obscurity in one very brief incident where he is presented more as an absence than a presence.

The book is replete with inconsistencies - for example, Cecil is initially presented as a Senior at Cambridge, several years older than George who is a Fresher, while Daphne is only 12. This would seem to compute as Cecil being almost ten years her senior, which - given their respective ages - makes the subsequent "affair" between Cecil and Daphne seem less likely to have taken place at all, and far less likely to have met the approval of Freda (who disliked Cecil, and dismissed Daphne as a "child" - as did Cecil himself in the early reported dialogue). Later the version presented is that Daphne was 16, was invited to Corley along with her brother George (with whom Cecil was having a relationship) and was sufficiently well-known among the family to marry Cecil's slightly younger brother, Dudley, upon Cecil's death - with her family's approval.

Sexuality is also presented inconsistently. Men who are strongly attracted to - and in many cases physically intimate with - men, and express dismissive views of women in that context, often find themselves yielding to overwhelming physical attraction to women. If the author is intending to present male sexuality as fluid and shifting, how then does this square with the concluding section where we are introduced to male couples who have been together for considerable lengths of time, in some cases even married (civil partnership) and the only shifts appear to be between loyalties to previous (male) partners? Female sexuality is presented one-dimensionally, if at all.

The role of place and space - specifically the houses themselves - is also inconsistent. At times they are protagonists themselves, and then the author appears to tire of them and finds other things to rabbit on about, often the interior life of some minor character who seems randomly chosen to take over the narration with no real purpose. It seems the author got as bored writing the latter part of the book as I did reading it. Some judicious editing would certainly have helped.

And then - the "mystery" of the missing poems. What was the point, really? To add interest to a narrative that had long run out of raison d'etre? To add yet another layer to the mounting frustration the reader feels with the book? To encourage you to read to the very last word when you'd far rather have abandoned it chapters ago? Or perhaps, to provide a point at which finally to end a spiralling saga from descending further into pointlessness and allow author and reader to escape with a few neurones still intact. (less)

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Aug 21, 2012 Tony Mac rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The resemblance and tribute to elegiac books like Brideshead Revisited is pretty obvious but what struck me most was the similarity to another recent and much acclaimed book, The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes. Intriguing, as both books are stylistically the polar opposite of each other: Hollinghurst's is long, leisurely and somewhat over-inflated while Barnes' is short, spare and perfectly pitched. Both concern long ago events that in themselves are entirely unremarkable but which, through...more The resemblance and tribute to elegiac books like Brideshead Revisited is pretty obvious but what struck me most was the similarity to another recent and much acclaimed book, The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes. Intriguing, as both books are stylistically the polar opposite of each other: Hollinghurst's is long, leisurely and somewhat over-inflated while Barnes' is short, spare and perfectly pitched. Both concern long ago events that in themselves are entirely unremarkable but which, through outcome and circumstance, resonate with protagonists and subsequent generations. Both books are essentially about the uncertainty and shifting nature of knowledge, memory and perceptions and how they can be flattered and tinkered with to suit individual needs. Hollinghurst's goes a bit further - as his book also deals on a certain level with celebrity - by showing how the events and their shifting portrayal can then become a professional battleground for future generations of writers and academics. This is how legends, rather than facts, are born I suppose.

Much as I enjoyed this book I also found it something of a struggle at times. By necessity, in the early sections inparticular, nothing much happens. We simply see a group of privileged and not especially likeable people go about their everyday business and conduct mundane chatter. I get the point of it but it's still pretty tedious. However I found the book better paced and funnier the longer it went on. I particularly liked the fun Hollinghurst had with the fact that during the social occasions that make up most of the characters minor dramas they are so drunk their memory is compromised right from the start. This leads to many comedic moments with blundering biographer Paul Bryant and his elderly, unwilling subjects later in the book.

One anomily did strike me about Hollinghurst's writing style, elegant though it undoubtedly is. I found the books many subtleties, subtexts and unspoken tensions slightly undermined by his insistence on explaining the meaning of every inflection, gesture and look his characters give. It's often amusing but sometimes less is more. You could say that about the whole book.(less)

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