The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Picador, 2011

Why?

Having been mesmerised by my first Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty - last summer despite its length and paucity of plot, I was attracted to The Stranger's Child in a second-hand bookshop recently.

It had the added benefit of being a "1913 novel" - a genre of which I can never get enough - as well as promising a sweeping exploration of societal change throughout the twentieth century.

Enjoyment factor

This is an elusive novel, exploring how people and stories are remembered (or misremembered) over time, rather than cataloguing events. Much of it is written in real time, with the first two parts affording 200 pages each to single weekends, in 1913 and 1926 respectively.

The characters are vivid, the period detail is faultless and the social observation is second to none - though, as with The Line of Beauty, it's a novel to admire rather than devour.

But unlike The Line of Beauty, there is a tantalising distance created between the characters and the reader. The time span of nearly a hundred years is portrayed in five snapshots (1913, 2026, 1967, 1979 and 2008), leaving the reader to piece together intervening events. I was hoping for a major revelation at the end, but this of course would have been beside the point: the premise of the novel is to show how lives can be rewritten by time. The last thing it aims to do is tie up loose ends.

It left me thinking ...

Primarily about the manufacture of cultural memory, and how events and people from the past can never be truly "known". The poet Cecil Valance, around whom the novel revolves but who we only meet briefly in Part I before he is killed in the Great War, was talented but never a genius, yet he becomes increasingly mythologised as the century wears on, reshaped to fit various characters' own narratives.

One might extrapolate from this that the "misinformation" that we deem to be rife in the modern age was always present to a degree, shaped by vested interests long before the invention of the algorithm.

In this respect, all of us will some day become "the stranger's child."