The Stranger?s Child is a very English novel. It studies the soul of England and its people?mainly its upper crust, its architecture and literature over a vast canvas of over a 100 years with the two World Wars thrown in. Alan Hollinghurst creates a novel of epic proportions, and it all begins in a garden in the summer of 1913.
The story unfolds when an aristocrat, Cecil Valance, visits the middle-class Sawles who live at Two Acres, a Victorian villa in Stanmore hill, a London suburb. The Sawles reciprocate by a visit to Corley Court, a Victorian monstrosity in Berkshire, home to the Valances.
Cecil, a mediocre poet who is on a weekend visit with his ?friend? from Cambridge, George Sawle, creates quiet an impression on the Sawle household. He is the aristocrat, who drinks too much, is untidy and needs to be waited upon. While having an affair with George, the young son of the family, he loses no opportunity and kisses George?s 16-year-old sister Daphne. The seduction is complete?his aristocratic ways, his worshiping the dawn and his efforts at poetry. The whole family is taken in by his ways, which are so different from their middle-class ways. Cecil also marks his weekend presence at the Two Acres with a poem, which becomes his enduring legacy. ?Two blessed acres of English ground?Whose secrets none shall ever hear?Hearty, lusty, true and bold, Yet shy to have its honour told.?
Cecil dies in German fire in the War, and his love poem (allegedly written for Daphne, but actually referring to his homosexual affair with George) is invoked by Churchill. It takes the life of a nationalistic war poem and turns Cecil into a hero of sorts. ?A first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many great masters,? as one character puts it.
The story spans over a century covering births, deaths and marriages spread out over five different parts. From Cecil?s visit to Two Acres the story moves to Corley Court. Daphne marries Cecil?s brother Dudley??a mad brute? of a man. By the end of it she is married thrice and questions are left hanging on the parentage of her offspring. Corley Court, home to Valances by the third part of the novel, is converted into a preparatory school. Here Daphne meets a young bank clerk, Paul Bryant, who has an affair with school teacher Peter Rowe. In the next part, the story revolves around Paul?s efforts at writing a biography of Cecil. In between there are two Wars and Two Acres has outgrown its utility, the Victorian folly, Corley Court with its jelly mould domes had changed irrevocably like the society and people who inhabit it.
Hollinghurst with his keen sense of architecture captures all these changes. The novel has masterful descriptions of buildings, gardens and changing urban landscape and with it the changing society and its mores, and the disappearing fortunes of the nobility.
Hollinghurst silences his critics somewhat by giving us a strong woman character in the form of Daphne. Though she is central to all the action, she still remains ?vaguely? peripheral to the story, which is essentially about Cecil. The irony is brought out by Daphne herself, ?Really Cecil means nothing to me?I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I am concerned, said Daphne half hearing herself go on, ?is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself.? Though Daphne marries thrice, it is the homosexual relationships which take up the imagination and space of the writer. Like in his earlier novels, Hollinghurst has desisted from graphic description of gay sex. Sample this: George looking at Cecil?s statue felt it was ?standardised.? And he had other images, ?more magical and private, images less seen then felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist.?
Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize for The Line of Beauty, took seven years to come out with this very witty and eloquent chronicle of the changing nooks and crannies, and brooks and woods of England, the English way and its society. The novel?s opening is a lot like Ian McEwan?s Atonement, which also had a young girl and a War in the background and a guest who leaves a huge imprint. There is a constant reminder also of Evelyn Waugh?s Brideshead Revisited. But this is classic Hollinghurst where memories become myths and myths are revisited and revised, and in turn become a canvas of English life and Englishness.
Renu Agal is a former special correspondent of the BBC