‘Corley’ has echoes of ‘Brideshead’ and in the first of five major set pieces (one for each section) a gathering of not quite bright young things have a drunken sing-song around the piano, trying to forget the pain of the war. In an addition to the Forster influence there is also a touch of the comic insouciance of Evelyn Waugh. Daphne is now Lady Valance having married Cecil’s younger brother Dudley, as was often the case with war-widows. We rejoin the story ten years later at Cecil’s home, ‘Corley Court’ which had been built up to mythic status in the first part of the novel, but is a rather crueller reality. The novel is divided into five sections, with significant years passing in between, which reminds me of Thackeray’s image in Vanity Fair of putting the puppets back in the box until its time for them to resume their play. As he leaves he is asked to sign Daphne’s autograph book, but instead writes out a poem for her entitled ‘Two Acres.’ There follows a proprietorial tussle over Cecil’s poem between the two siblings, of which their mother tries to mediate though cannot help involving herself in as the first section concludes delightfully with her looking at ‘the poem he had written about her house.’ The poem and the inspiration for its composition becomes immortalised as Cecil is extinguished along with hundreds of thousands of other young men on the Western Front, and the remainder of the book explores the extraordinary legacy of his short life and the lives it shapes.

He beguiles everyone he meets including George’s younger sister Daphne who he falls in love with despite being intimately involved with George. Cecil is a Byronic figure in the mould of Rupert Brooke, who he is acquainted and as is suggested, perhaps even in competition with.

It recalls the events of a single weekend in 1913 when Cecil Valance, a Cambridge poet visits his friend George Sawle and family at their house ‘Two Acres’ in Stanmore, then rural Middlesex now suburban greater London. The opening section of The Stranger’s Child is a beautiful elegy for Edwardian England almost continuing where Howards End concludes, set against a backdrop of pastoral innocence about to be changed forever by the impending war. Indeed, ‘Only Connect’ E.M Forster’s famous epigraph to Howards End permeates the text as a principle that unites the characters outside of their historical context. It is both a celebration of and a memorial for a way of English life that is long past, but made present through one poet, two families, two houses and many differing accounts from all those connected over the course of the twentieth century. The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel comes from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H, one of several historical figures that feature in this richly allusive work.

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