When I began reading this superb novel last week, my regular routines fell away from me and I entered another world. I was able to think of little else and, now that I’ve finished it, I feel almost bereaved.
After Alan Hollinghurst won the UK’s Man Booker Prize in 2004 with The Line of Beauty, he must have agonized over what to write next. Two published interviews suggested different directions — short stories, and something more like War and Peace (he was found reading this by the interviewer, and praised it very highly). He’s certainly taken the latter course with The Stranger’s Child, a novel in five episodes that stretches from 1913 to 2008 and in which the two world wars, though not actually described, occupy pivotal positions.
This is a different kind of novel from Hollinghurst’s previous four. The combination of very explicit gay sex and extreme literary sophistication propelled his early books to celebrity (or notoriety), but here, though gay history in the UK context is undoubtedly one of the novel’s themes, sex scenes are few, and never explicit in the old way. In fact the reader is sometimes tempted with lead-ups to such episodes, only to have his expectations dashed. “No, you can’t have them,” Hollinghurst seems to be saying. “This book’s something different.”
And indeed it is. Many subjects rarely close to gay men’s hearts — family history, provincial life, literary life, historical detail meticulously researched — dominate the long narrative. And whereas the ground-breaking and often comic The Swimming-Pool Library was driven by surprising plot revelations, The Stranger’s Child unambiguously describes the event that’s going to become the subject of speculation for the next 95 years close to the start. Thus the already knowledgeable reader becomes exasperated at the fictional characters’ uncertainties, and though there are surprises, the story for the most part deliberately forgoes suspense, one of a novelist’s greatest potential assets.
The plot concerns a minor poet, a youthful aristocrat who was killed in World War I. We know he was bisexual from the beginning, but this truth is either unknown to, or deliberately hidden by, those in the novel who knew him, and their descendants. Some of the truth is eventually uncovered, but at the same time crucial documents are shown to have been concealed, destroyed, or never mailed as promised. The novel ends with the modern world having at best a partial understanding of the past, and the implication is that this is what life is always like, and always has been like. The transience of everything not described in documents that are lucky enough to survive, and even their essential ambiguity, is the second of this novel’s themes.
Of course there is another and more optimistic current running against this one. English gay life is shown to have moved on from being a guilty, unmentionable secret into a world of civil partnerships and fashionable gay celebrities. This new world is displayed in the book’s penultimate section, but the crucial final section is far bleaker, with a destructive bonfire, and everything that might have remained of the pre-1914 world being casually obliterated.
This major publication is compulsive reading, and there isn’t a dull sentence anywhere in it. But some of its obsessions are nonetheless very dark. Old age and its inevitable afflictions — something dreaded by gays in particular — loom large and recur as the generations succeed one another. England itself also receives somber treatment. A packet of dreary commercial biscuits leads one character to muse on “the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life,” while another, regarding the tackiness of a semi-urbanized country scene, thinks “I’m not dying here.”
Alcohol features prominently, too. One octogenarian character considers that all the most important moments of her life occurred when she was drunk — that is after 6:30pm on any evening — and the same could be said about many of the main incidents of the novel itself.
A hostile reader might consider that buildings are more important to Hollinghurst than people, but the truth is they’re inseparable. He’s always shown a marked interest in architecture, and here the aristocratic poet’s Victorian country-house in its successive states — modernized in the 1920s, then turned into a boys’ school — plus the middle-class house where the action begins, and a variety of less enviable habitations, are all described in great detail, if sometimes with a shudder. But this is only one aspect of the researched background — clothes, cars, and ways of thinking and speaking are also part of the historical tour de force this novel represents.
Other reviewers have seen literary precedents for The Stranger’s Child — Forster and Waugh have been much touted — but this is a more original novel than such comparisons imply. That Hollinghurst is a classic novelist is now beyond doubt, and this book, even if it fails to match superficial gay expectations, extends the author’s range, and makes him an even more substantial figure on
the UK literary scene than he
was previously.
There are, it’s true, some stylistic ticks that are ever-present in Hollinghurst’s writing, though they scarcely detract from the highly pleasurable experience of reading him. One is a consistent tendency to remark on a character’s reaction as being “as if he were ...” and then proceeding to an unexpected analysis that displays more than anything else the author’s own wit and ingenuity. Another is to present a character’s reaction to something as being simultaneously (a) and (b) — often opposites. The effect of this is to put the author in an unassailable, unpindownable position, and again reinforces his superiority over the reader. But it’s to Hollinghurst’s credit that, even when we’ve perceived such things, all we really want is more of the same.
This is a wonderful, sad, thoughtful, unforgettable novel. It contains enough minor mysteries to justify the luxury of a second reading, and is a maze of perceptions about the present and the past that’s an incomparable pleasure to get lost in. It’s both intensely enjoyable and at the same time an instant classic, as Hollinghurst himself in some other context might well have remarked.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist