Alan Hollinghurst. The Stranger’s Child. Knopf, 2011. Hardback. 435p. $27.95. 978-0-307-27276-8.

Alan Hollinghurst is one of Britain’s most prominent writers and the most famous gay writer, like Edmund White and Felice Picano rolled into one.  He burst upon the scene with his Swimming Pool Library, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988 and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989.  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.

Now we have another magnificent, complex, multi-layered novel, The Stranger’s Child.  The title comes from a line in a Tennyson poem, “Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,” 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 “And year by year the landscape grow [sic] Familiar to the stranger’s child.”  The reader assumes the stranger to be Cecil, and the child refers to one of the novel’s enduring mysteries.

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.  These two young men, both undergraduates at Cambridge University, are engaged in a passionate love, or perhaps more accurate, sex affair.

Daphne, George’s 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, “Two Acres,” in her autograph book.  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.

Did Daphne get pregnant with her first Child, Corinna?  That’s the mystery that pervades the novel. Hollinghurst’s narrative follows Daphne’s marriage to Cecil’s younger brother Dudley and their divorce when Daphne runs off with the gay artist Revel Ralph before her third and final marriage.

Each of the novel’s five parts, set a generation apart, introduces a new character, requiring the reader to learn the character’s relationship with previous characters, and each generation focuses on sorting out the true story of Cecil and his affairs.  In the third section, gay Paul Bryant has just begun working in a bank managed by Leslie Keeping, Corinna’s husband.  Keeping suffers agoraphobia from the war and can’t bear to be alone; Paul meets others in the family, including Daphne, when he walks Keepinig home.  In the fourth section, Paul has left the bank and becomes a biographer, determined to uncover the Cecil’s mysteries of Cecil.  In the last section, set in 2008, Paul reveals the family’s secrets, including Corinna’s paternity.

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.

Any fan of LGBT historical mystery fiction will want to read it, and any library collecting serious British fiction must have this book. It’s a masterpiece.

Reviewer: James Doig Anderson, Professor Emeritus

Library and Information Science

Rutgers University