Golden lads and girls | 2 July 2011

Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife

It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question.

Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional poet called Cecil Valance, a diffusion-line Rupert Brooke described years after his death in the first world war as ‘a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters’.

Cecil is a Ripping Yarns toff, complete with Victorian country house, flamboyant sodomitical tendencies and membership of the Apostles. The first section of the novel describes his visit in 1913 to his younger Cambridge friend George Sawle’s sub- urban house, Two Acres — an agonising piece of period social comedy.