The Stranger's Child

August 29, 2011
Hollinghurst, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty, published seven years ago, stakes his claim for Most Puckishly Bemused English Novelist with this rambunctious stepchild to the mannered satires of Henry Green, E.M. Forster, and especially Evelyn Waugh. Fancy young George Sawle returns from Cambridge in 1913 to his family estate of Two Acres in the company of the dashing poet Cecil Valance, secretly his lover. Cecil enjoys success and popularity wherever he goes, and George’s precocious sister, Daphne, falls under his spell. To her he gives a poem about Two Acres, a work whose reputation will outlive Cecil, for he is fated to perish in WWI. Hollinghurst then jumps ahead to Daphne’s marriage to Cecil’s brother Dudley and commences the series of generation-spanning indiscretions and revisionist biographies that complicate Cecil’s legacy: he is variously a rebel, a tedious war poet, and, possibly, the father of Daphne’s daughter. Time plays havoc with fashions, relationships, and sexual orientation; the joke is on the legions of memoirists, professors, and literary treasure hunters whose entanglements with eyewitnesses produce something too fickle and impermanent to be called legend. Hollinghurst’s novel, meanwhile, could hardly be called overserious, but nearly 100 years of bedroom comedy is a lot to keep up with, and the author struggles at times to maintain endless amusement over the course of the five installments that make up this book. But convolution is part of the point. A sweet tweaking of English literature’s foppish little cheeks by a distinctly 21st-century hand. Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

October 1, 2011
Lives tangle and untangle in a literate, literary mystery at the heart of World War I by Man Booker Prize winner Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty, 2004, etc.). Cecil Valance is a poet of terrific talent who, according to a guest in a comfortably English countryside house, is "not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson." In his defense, he is still young. In the defense of everyone he meets, he is irresistible, a Lord Byron with sensitive appetites and a definite awareness of the effect he has on those he meets. George Sawle, scion of the modest manor, is awestruck. So is his sister, Daphne, who melts whenever Cess is around, even taking a puff on a cigar. But Cecil is the real deal as a poet of the Sassoon/Graves/Brooke school, as we learn on reading a heavily edited scrap of paper retrieved from a wastebasket: "Love as vital as the spring / And secret as -- XXX (something!)." War is looming, and Cecil, who professes to like hunting out in the fields, seems pleased at the prospect of trying his skills out on the Kaiser's boys. Alas, things don't work out as planned. Generations pass, and Cecil Valance's poems are firmly in the canon, especially a little one left as a commemoration to the Sawle family, with a carefully structured reference to kisses that might pass between the lips of lovers of any old gender. Now a biographer, working with the clues, is making the claim that Valance belongs in the canon not just of modernist British poetry, but of gay literature as well--a claim that, though seemingly well defended, stirs up controversy. Does it matter? Not to Cecil, poor fellow, "laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail." And perhaps not to those left behind, now gone themselves or very nearly so. But yes, it matters, and such is the stuff of biography. How do we know the truth about anyone's life? Hollinghurst's carefully written, philosophically charged novel invites us to consider that question.

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May 1, 2011

In 1913, while visiting the family of Cambridge classmate George Sawle, Cecil Vance, heir to Corley Court, pens a poem in the autograph album of George's worshipful younger sister. After Cecil is killed in World War I, the poem becomes famous nationwide. Decades later, a revisionist biographer comes snooping. I was truly taken by the award-winning Hollinghurst's quietly elegant The Line of Beauty and am anticipating this next novel--his first in seven years. With a 75,000-copy first printing, a four- or five-city tour, and a reading group guide.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2011
That Hollinghurst won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty wouldn't surprise even a reader new to him. If the previous book stimulated as well as this new one does, it must have deserved all its praise. Nevertheless, Hollinghurst's at-once sharp, humorous, and poignant social satireshe is a literary child of the great English novelist E. M. Forsterstrike many readers, experienced or new, as old-fashioned. This slow-building narrative visits various time periods between the year just prior to the outbreak of WWI and the present, as changing social attitudesnamely, a liberalizing of legal and cultural views toward homosexualityonly increase the critical attention paid to English poet Cecil Valance (Cecil Vyse was a character in Forster's A Room with a View). This young, beautiful, and talented poet was lost in the trenches of the Great War (shades of Rupert Brooke?). Valance's close involvement with the Sawle familyGeorge Sawle was a college buddy of Cecil's (and more, la the two male protagonists in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited), and after the war, George's sister married Cecil's brotheris made common knowledge by a celebrated poem Cecil wrote to . . . whom? George? Cecil's impact, familial and literary, leaves a legacy inspirational to some and uncomfortable to others. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 75,000 indicates the publisher's expectations that this novel will follow its predecessor into popular and critical esteem.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)