People are strange
The Line of Beauty author Alan Hollinghurst returns with a sweeping examination of sexual politics through the 20th century. He discusses the gestation of The Stranger’s Child and the pressures of following a Booker win.
Anne Sexton, 22 Aug 2011
Fans of Alan Hollinghurst are a patient lot. It’s not as if they have a choice. It has been seven years since last novel, The Line Of Beauty, was released and scooped one of literature’s most prestigious prizes, the Man Booker. Working at his own pace means that Hollinghurst felt no pressure to live up to any expectations.
“I am so slow so it’s not as if I do anything as a reflex action to anything else. I thought of it as a blessing and an opportunity and that the next time around I’d have a captive audience waiting for my book. Luckily, I am quite good at shutting out worries of how I’m going to perform and satisfying my own designs,” says Hollinghurst.
Sitting over tea on a lovely warm day in Dublin, Hollinghurst is in fine form, as well he should be. His new novel, The Stranger’s Child, has received well-deserved praise from almost every quarter.
The Stranger’s Child opens in 1913 and is written in episodes up until 2008. Its subject matter is a poet, Cecil Valance, a rich, aristocratic young man who exerts a magnetic attraction over almost everyone who meets him, most notably his Cambridge friend George Sawle and his sister Daphne, both of whom have intimate relationships with him. When Cecil is killed during the First World War, his poem ‘Two Acres’, supposedly written for Daphne, becomes widely regarded as an invocation of a lost England, much like Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’.
“I was deliberately toying with Brooke,” says Hollinghurst. “I got interested in that world a few years ago, the Cambridge world before the First World War. I read the first biography of Brooke, not a perfect book by any means, but I thought he was an interesting and complex character, a martyr to his own beauty in a way, who had a lot of unsatisfactory relationships with adoring women and adoring men. I gave Cecil some of those attributes. But that’s why I mention Brooke from time to time and have Cecil know him. That’s what writers do a lot of the time if they have a fictional character based on a real one, they bring in the real one as well to show they are not the same.”
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