The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

There's a bit in The Picture of Dorian Gray where Wilde describes the history of the objects that Dorian collects, which have to do with figures famous for their homoerotic relationships, and as an article I read* described in, constructs of 'queer genealogy' through these objects. That's really what this book does, it constructs a history of gay culture and relationships in Britain over 100 years (from around the 1910s), orbiting around the figure of 'second-rate' young poet Cecil Valance, a sort of Wilfred Owen/Rupert Brook type who died in the First World War. It's an absolutely brilliant book, incredibly clever, controlled and elegant in its structure. I never managed a Hollinghurst novel before (I've tried The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty and backed off in confusion), but I actually remember picking this one up about six years ago and making a mental note of the fact that it looked interesting. Hollinghurst plays a lovely postmodern game with style, adopting the literary style of each era he writes about as the novel takes 10-30-year leaps forward. He masterfully captures how the way people speak, write and think changes from decade to decade, the older generation sticking to the language of its own day, while the younger moves forward. And as the language changes, so does the way people act, and the way they think of themselves and their sexuality, so that words and action become completely fused. Memory is a major theme in the book, and Hollinghurst works wonders with it, as different people remember the same things in increasingly different ways as time goes on, so that by the end, stories and recollections seem to proliferate absolutely uselessly. I have a hard time focussing on long descriptions of landscape and architecture, which is a pity with this book, because architecture becomes an important way of expressing change. Corley Court, the childhood home of Cecil Valance, is at the beginning a 'Great House', then undergoes various transformations, ending up as a school by the late 1960s. At one point, there's a problem with the school's ceiling, and there's a huge hole in it, through which one of the characters, standing on a ladder, sees the ceiling as it was before the renovations of the 1920s, illustrating the way layers of history are constantly being laid on top of one another, stripped back, and then replaced in this novel. The funny thing about this book is that I didn't like any of the characters at all, except maybe Peter Rowe, who we hear very little about, I especially hated the dreadful gossipy biographer Paul Bryant (he's supposed to be dreadful, but I found reading the bits about his hard because he was such a repulsive person). It's such an incredibly clever and skillfully written book that I am in complete awe, it was both a fantastic pleasure to read and really made me think, like an elaborate intellectual puzzle.

*the article is 'Dandyism, Visuality and the Camp Gem: Collections of Jewels in Huysmans and Wilde' by Victoria Mills in the book Illustrations, Optics, and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Visual Cultures, which is one of the best studies of Wilde's work I've read (and I've read a lot of those)