By Diane Maclean
The Stranger’s Child, the latest novel by Alan Hollinghurst, was never intended as a full-length book. Hollinghurst had hoped, after the rigors of writing his 2004 Booker prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, to concentrate on short stories. He wrote one, and from there the idea for The Stranger’s Child developed – or, as he says, “I sadly saw that I had another novel on my hands.”
The title is taken from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and the theme – that of looking both forward and backwards into memory – seemed to Hollinghurst like “a beautiful summing-up for a book: the literary reputation and what happens to our name in the future”.
The book itself is divided into five chapters which follow characters from before the Great War, up to the present day. Central to the novel is the legacy and reputation of a young poet, Cecil Valance, who is killed while fighting. The novel deals with the unreliability of memory, and the whimsical way in which someone can be remembered, and their actions interpreted, by different people.
Writing about such a particular time in history, and with his own particular knowledge of literature from the war period, Hollinghurst had to fight hard against pastiche. He had to work to exorcise E M Forster: “When I got him out of the way it [the book] happened more easily.”
At the centre of the book is a poem written by Valance, glimpses of which are revealed, but never the complete work. Hollinghurst won the Newdigate Prize for verse in 1974 while at Oxford – but, in Valance’s poetry, he set out deliberately to write something of questionable merit. It came easily and he found he “could write bad poetry till the cows come home".
Readers of Hollinghurst’s other books will find thematic echoes. There is the obsession with the upper classes, the secret life of a gay writer, and the meticulous attention to architecture and exploration of places. However, similarities to the themes of his 1988 novel The Swimming Pool Library only struck him once he had completed the book, which he concedes must “seem rather dim-witted of me”. Hollinghurst had been looking towards Alice Munro’s episodic structure and had taken his inspiration from her collection of short stories Runaway.
The Saturday night audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was as erudite in its questioning as ever, even if they did have to fight against first rain drumming on the marquee roof, then fireworks punctuating Hollinghurst’s answers. He was asked whether winning the Booker had helped or hindered his writing. The answer was both.
Usually, Hollinghurst starts to “get a prickle of a new book” as he finishes the one he is writing – but that didn’t happen this time and, although it was wonderful winning the Booker, it was distracting. “I travelled a huge amount talking about the book until I couldn’t bear to talk about it any more," he said, "so then I pulled down the shutters and got on with writing.”
The writing took four-and-a-half years, but he has already been rewarded by his inclusion in this year’s Man Booker longlist. While he waits, Hollinghurst is determined to try and have another crack at writing short stories. After all, he wrote one in his 20s and another in his 50s. The next one, he muses, must surely be due.
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