Hollinghurst pays an homage to the great Sebald

The bad and the good, the bad first: I understand that homosexuality and homoeroticism were taboo subjects for literary fiction for generations, and in fact this taboo drove Forster away from writing fiction for the latter part of his life, a tragedy, and that Alan Hollinghurst is using fiction, in particular his novel The Stranger's Child in part to examine the different attitudes toward homosexual love across several generations in England - and yet - the many scenes of basically just "randy" coupling - not loving coupling - especially in part 3 of the novel are really not all that interesting or literary or, in this day and age, shocking. If these were scenes of heterosexual love we would dismiss them, and probably the novel, as a cheap thrill - so I know that a deep underlying current in Stranger's Child is the furtiveness and the shame that drives these men to take weird risks and to be reckless and aggressive with one another, much more than a hetero couple would be for the most part - yet the characters are not interesting or in fact developed beyond the fact of their sexual orientation and drive. His more famous novel, The Line of Beauty, is also about homosexual love over a the course of an era, and it begins, if I remember well, with a very graphic, lurid secret encounter and ends with characters deeply aged and ill, victims of their own recklessness during the time of AIDS - a very affecting book. OK, but for the good: there's more to Stranger than the sexuality, and I like part 4 much more than part 3, so far - because to me the heart and soul of the book is the dead poet Cecil and how his lie and death affected generations of his family and of others, how his reputation changes over the years (I really like that H. makes clear in the late stages of the novel that Cecil was a minor poet whose reputation rose because of his tragic wartime death). Though, as noted in previous posts, I have trouble believing in the unity of characters across the large time-jumps of the novel - nothing in part 3, circa 1965, led me to think that Paul the timid banker would become a literary biographer in part 4, circa 1975, I do like reading about him in this new incarnation - his chance encounter with Daphne, now aged and infirm and maybe a little dotty of years of alcoholism, is brought off very well and in particular I like his visit to Two Acres, the scene of the first part of the novel: his discovery of the skeleton of the old place amidst a budding surburban development is great and is no doubt Hollinghurst's homage to the great Sebald - another one of the literary ghosts living in the atmosphere of this novel. Surprising to see that Two Acres, which I'd thought of as a country estate, and it probably was at the outset of the novel, circa 1915, is now part of the London suburbs, even on the tube line.