Golden lads and girls | 2 July 2011

Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife

It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question.

Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional poet called Cecil Valance, a diffusion-line Rupert Brooke described years after his death in the first world war as ‘a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters’.

Cecil is a Ripping Yarns toff, complete with Victorian country house, flamboyant sodomitical tendencies and membership of the Apostles. The first section of the novel describes his visit in 1913 to his younger Cambridge friend George Sawle’s sub- urban house, Two Acres — an agonising piece of period social comedy. Cecil’s magnetism is apparent, but so too is his youth, his vanity, his essential ridiculousness.

As well as ravishing George, Cecil flirts with his 16-year-old sister Daphne — and when he leaves, he inscribes a poem in her autograph book. The poem, ‘Two Acres’ — a backward-looking piece of Hamadryad-thronged Georgian kitsch — goes on to become very well known (in part, amusingly, because its author adds a stanza or two to retro-fit it as a war poem).

Four subsequent sections — set in the Twenties, the Sixties, the Eighties and in 2008 — pick up the threads: finding familiar characters in new settings, introducing new characters, and unfolding bit by bit the details of the cataclysms that have befallen them in the years between.

In the 1920s, for instance, we find Daphne — apparently having been engaged to Cecil before his death — now unhappily married to Cecil’s war-maddened younger brother Dudley.