The Memory Game

A favourite for the Man Booker prize this year, Alan Hollinghurst’s country house novel may appear oddly familiar to Indian readers of English literature

One could argue that, given enough sentence-clogging caveats, it’s probably true that the lives of the English elite, at least insofar as these lives are lived in literature, are second nature to us now. By ‘us’, I mean a particular kind of Indian reader of English who, having grown up with Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse, feels a keen and familiar fondness—experiences even, perhaps, a kind of metaphysical nostalgia—for the arcane formalities and unembarrassed self-obsessions of the English nobility let loose to frolic in their castles, and tended to by armies of discreet valets, mercurial cooks and flighty housemaids. 

Modern versions of the country house novel have been, if anything, even more evocative of the peculiarly innocent and culpable nature of pre-War, upper-class English lives. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for example, is among the best of the genre, and Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, The Stranger’s Child, is a splendid addition to it. Both writers convey an obvious regard for the courtesies, the refined leisure of the early 19th-century country house, while also weaving into their stories an inescapable sense of the havoc wreaked by the violence of class, power and imperial ambition over subsequent decades.

The Stranger’s Child spans a century, beginning just before World War I and ending in 2008. Through its five parts, the novel skips across vast chunks of time as it follows the lives of several generations of the Valance and Sawle families and the people they befriend, influence and sometimes destroy. The families meet through Cecil Valance, heir to the Valance coat-of-arms, mansion and fortune, and George Sawle, the second son of a family teetering with only genteel protest into the middle-class. Cecil and George are friends at Cambridge and visit each other’s homes: George is rather awed by Cecil’s grand relations and even grander Victorian house, while Cecil, who has already achieved some acclaim for his poetry and has a talent for drawing a room’s attention to himself, entirely overawes George’s family, of whom the adolescent Daphne is promptly besotted with her brother’s friend. So far so good, but here’s the rub: George and Cecil are lovers.

As it begins, then, The Stranger’s Child is split into two ‘levels’: a new kind of upstairs/downstairs as it were. On one hand is the action, the marriage, the divorce, the ageing, the things that can be spoken of. As the novel progresses, it is Daphne who emerges as central to this aspect of it. On the other hand are the secrets, of which George and Cecil’s affair forms the nucleus. Like a snowball gathering mass as it rolls downhill, their unspoken homosexuality gathers all the novel’s secrets—and there are many—to itself. It’s a slow accretion and handled with such subtle attention to detail (and such sure-footed avoidance of sentimentality) that its effect, especially when the novel enters an age when homosexuality—or sexual digression of any kind, for that matter—is no longer taboo, is one of deep tragedy.

Much of the novel’s force, in fact, gathers from wounds that are either secret or marginal. The two World Wars, for example, though never shown, have a profound impact on its characters. Many go to war, many don’t return, and, of those who do, many are permanently scarred. That someone ‘had a bad war’ runs like a mournful refrain through the narrative. Later, a whole section of The Stranger’s Child unfolds over a luxurious weekend of excess in the Valance home, the very weekend, we later learn, that preceded the General Strike of 1926, which ended in defeat for the strikers and considerably weakened British trade unions.

Still, The Stranger’s Child is not a gloomy book by any means. Hollinghurst’s prose is not only beautiful, it’s often very funny. Here, for example, is Daphne, now 83 and feeling badgered by Paul Bryant, a young biographer trying to write a book on Cecil Valance: “He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. ‘What was Cecil like?’—what a stupid question…” And, ‘When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?’ She’d said ‘Pass!’ to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind. She thought tomorrow she would just say ‘Pass!’ to everything.’

Unable to sleep, Daphne thinks of what it is to remember a life, particularly one’s own, and there follows a lyrical meditation on ageing, on memory and—perhaps its most longing, melancholic paragraph—on books, ‘the hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read’.

‘…novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all… Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside—a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.’

Now, when the Valance home has become a boarding school and its former inhabitants’ passions and follies are blowing like dry leaves off the earth, when these fictional lives have intermingled so greatly that even the characters pause for breath before detailing their exact relationship with one another, the reader may find her own memory of the novel’s events blurring. For all that, it grows richer in emotional nuance.

Perhaps it is this very kind of fuzzy memory that makes the country house feel so lived-in to Indian readers. These were country houses, after all, that ran the British Raj and yet the Empire is at their very margins—as readers, we walk into drawing rooms where our actual presence would be more than unbearable, unimaginable. And yet, privilege is not something to which the Indian reader of English is unaccustomed. Its violence and insularity are invoked by us, for us, every day. Watching it unravel in alien yet achingly familiar contexts is an exercise in both empathy and self-reflection for those of us who are, for better or worse, these strangers’ kin.

Parvati Sharma is the author of The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love

Alan HolinghurstMan Bookernovel