The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, $32.99.
Seven years after British author Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize, his follow-up novel displays much of that playful quality of writing and engrossing acuteness of characterisation, but in a new world which spans several decades.
This well-made tale starts just before the World War I and brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, amid a clutch of other classic authors like E.M. Forster and Henry James.
At the outset, the English upper classes are at their zenith living a rarefied existence of manhattans at sunset and frisky frolics in manicured gardens after dinner.
George Sawle delights his rather more middle-class family at the modest Two Acres by bringing uni chum, clandestine lover, aristocrat and poet Cecil Valance home to stay for the weekend.
Handsome, debonair, rakish Cecil immediately thrills George’s sister Daphne writing a poem for her (but really about George).
And when Cecil dies young in the war and Daphne marries his brother, the ironic reconstruction of who Cecil was takes on a fictitious life all of its own.
Divided into four sections, each set decades apart, yet interweaving our characters’ lives, the novel examines the inevitable decay of a society built on privilege, but with a sense of nostalgia that has you longing for a highball.
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