When will the English ever give up on the country-estate novel?

Will the English ever give up on the Upstairs, Downstairs theme, the country house (or estate) novel, the boys coming back from Oxbridge - ever? It's been more than a century - time to move on, don't you think? Admittedly, Ian MacEwen did a great job with this overly familiar material in Atonement - I almost suspect he took on the project as a dare, using not only one of the most overdone British themes, the country-estate novel, but the other one as well: the bombing of London. But he had a great plot and vvid characters; he covered a broad sweep of time, and his story was full of surprising and saddening twists - startling, without being sensational. Not sure yet what to make of Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child." So far it feels like a novel that could have been written 100 years ago - it's not only of the period just before World War I but it actually seems to be in the style of the era. Focus at least first section, Two Acres (the name of the modest apparently estate) son comes home with his Cambridge friend, a promising young poet, Cecil, and introduces his friend to mom, sister Daphne, brother Hubert, and assorted neighbors. Every reader knows that the two guys are a couple, and it's astonishing that nobody else quite figures that out; Hollinghurst's twist on the old U/D theme is that just about everyone (the guys, anyway) is homosexual or at least seems to have latent homoerotic drive. There's a lot of insinuation in first 50 or so pages but not a lot happens - they're setting up the story that lies ahead, I guess: various references to the war, which I'm sure will affect everyone's life in various ways. There's a good reason why literary protagonists who are meant to be creative geniuses are rarely writers: usually the novelist will create an artist (Lawrence) or a musician (Mann). If you create a writer as your protagonist, a poet, anyway, you're going to have to give - rather than describe - examples of his or her work. Hollinghurst is up against a real obstacle here: is Cecil meant to be a great poet? Everyone seems to think so, but the verse H. creates for him is simple doggerel and schlock. I hope this novel moves off in surprising ways, but the first 50 pages seem like very well-trodden ground.