A literary mystery

Part 2 of Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child," Revel, plays some tricks with us, and it's hard not to feel a bit manipulated by the author: it opens in a country estate with a characters whom we cannot identify at first writing a letter to character we don't know. Only gradually, like a picture coming into focus slowly, do we figure out who the characters are, where the setting is, what the time period is, and what's happened since the close of part 1 as Cecil was departing from his weekend visit at Two Acres, leaving behind a lengthy poem: it's now about 15 years later, the late 1920s. Cecil has died in combat in the World War. Daphne, whom Cecil had come on to at the end of part 1, though we know that he is gay and involved furtively with Daphne's brother, George, is now married to: ta dah - not Cecil (Hollinghurst teases us with that possibility until he reveals that C. is dead) but Cecil's brother, Dudley, who we had not met. They have two young children, Wilifred (?) and Corinna, typical British upper-class kids of the era, talented and precocious and pretty much ignored by their parents. Dudley is some kind of historian or scholar; Cecil is now recognized as one of the talented war poets, whose career ended tragically - perhaps loosely modeled on Rupert Brooke? Another family friend, Sebastien (Sebby, they all have these childish nicknames) is embarking on an authorized biography of Cecil, and he is invited to the Valance estate, Corley (Cecil's family estate and now the home of Daphne) for a weekend to gather info through interviews with those who knew Cecil. Over the course of several interviews and awkward encounters, it becomes clear that Sebby knows that Cecil was gay, in fact Sebby may have had something going with with Cecil. It's also clear that Cecil and Dudley's mother, Louisa aka The General, wants this biography to be sanitized. Also clear that Daphne's brother George does not want to be outed as Cecil's one-time lover; George is now married and trying to distance himself from his past, and maybe from his present. So there are a lot of seething tensions in this section of the book - and also a lot of talk. Someone quips that it's getting to be much like an Agatha Christie (did she write back then?) and that's true. I'm kind of a sucker for literary mysteries - I loved The Aspern Papers, e.g. - so I'm drawn along to see what they discover about Cecil and how that changes everyone's life: but wouldn't it be better if we knew less than we do? If the mystery were kept from us rather than, however improbably, from the characters?