Dead Poets Society

One of the most damning put-downs in the history of literature was administered by Katherine Mansfield to E.M. Forster. “Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot,” she wrote in 1917. “He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” You could say the same thing about Man Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, which comes to us wafted on the wings of rapturous British reviews. It’s rich and magnificent and tenderly human, but perhaps slightly lacking in tea.

The plot of The Stranger’s Child arches grandly over almost a full century, beginning in 1913 when George, an undergraduate at Cambridge, takes his aristocratic friend Cecil home to meet his family. Cecil is a poet with a little talent and a lot of boorish charisma, and he shags George and kisses George’s sister Daphne. Then he scribbles a poem in Daphne’s autograph book, goes off to World War I and gets killed.

Cecil’s specter haunts the rest of the novel. He becomes posthumously famous–“a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many great masters.” The Stranger’s Child leaps forward a few decades every 100 or so pages–1926, 1967, 1979, 2008–to show us the slow spectacle of time’s ravaging and rubbishing everything and everyone Cecil knew. We see Daphne miserably married off to his younger brother–twice as boorish, with none of the charm. His family seat is turned into a school for boys. A timorous but determined biographer roots through the tangled relationships Cecil left behind.

Hollinghurst plays brilliantly off half a dozen English classics at once–he’s like a grand master playing simultaneous chess matches against Forster, Rupert Brooke, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan–and he sketches his moments with a superfine nib and optical clarity: a car isn’t just a car, it’s “a pea-green Hillman Imp, sounding rough in a low gear, windscreen white with dust, perhaps a farmer’s car.”

But sometimes you wish he weren’t such a meticulous realist. He wouldn’t be caught dead giving us a beautiful or glamorous moment without an accompanying deflating detail: a typical set piece consists of a funeral ruined by a faulty microphone. After a while, you start to miss Cecil. He’s a boor, but he’s the only character Hollinghurst allows to be larger than life. There’s something of a prolonged diminuendo about The Stranger’s Child. The ending is barely audible–which is probably the point. But it’s a shame, when the teapot is so magnificent, that all the tea went cold long ago.