I don’t usually read much fiction. My reading tastes tend towards history and other nonfiction. But I seem to be on a British fiction kick lately; I’ve just read two new novels in a row, both by British authors. In fact, I’ve read five novels this year, which is a lot for me. I think owning a Kindle has made me more adventurous in my reading tastes, because I can download a sample of almost any book that seems interesting and try it out for free.
Anyway, as for the British fiction I’ve just read:
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, is a great little mystery-box of a book. It’s very short, fewer than 200 pages, and I read it in an evening. I’ve never read a whole book in an evening, or even in a weekend — I’m a slow reader — but this just flew by. It’s a wonderfully constructed story about the unreliability of memory, and you have no idea what it’s all about until the end.
Then there’s The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst, which I just finished today and is a little more problematic.
I’m not sure what to think of it. It’s beautifully written, filled with wonderful little observations about the way people speak and comport themselves, but the writing is not paired with a sufficiently interesting story.
It starts out good, with tantalizing hints of a forbidden same-sex relationship, but — for an Alan Hollinghurst novel — the relationship isn’t explored deeply or explicitly enough. Still, I kept with the book through its time changes, and after about 150 pages I became more absorbed and was glad I’d stuck with it. I enjoyed the middle section the most, set in the late 1960s, because it focused on a budding romance between two appealing gay men and had a nice “comedy of manners” feel. But from there things went downhill; most of the last 150 pages consists of someone conducting interviews with various people for a biography. There is no sense of narrative propulsion, just one plodding interview after another. And because the biographer is trying to solve a mystery that we, the readers, already know the answer to, there is no suspense, either. I know “plot” isn’t really the point of this book, that Hollinghurst is trying to say big things about 20th century Britain, the art of biography, homosexuality, the class system, and so on. But there needs to be a good story to keep you reading, and there isn’t really enough of one.
At least there is the writing to fall back on. The descriptions of a middle-aged woman playing the piano and an elderly woman writing out a check at the bank are little gems, and there are plenty of nice social observations. Yet the book is at times over-written. At certain points I wanted Hollinghurst to stop describing the hidden shades of meaning in what a character was saying and to just get on with it already.
The book doesn’t exactly fly by, so if you’re in a hurry, look for something else. But if you don’t care so much about plot and are in the mood to slow down and enjoy some fine writing, this might work for you.
A few years ago I read Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which is a nice satire of Thatcherism in 1980s Britain, and includes a memorable scene where the gay young liberal protagonist accidentally meets the Iron Lady at a rich person’s house party while high on the cocaine he’s just snorted upstairs. That one was a little short on plot, too, but it didn’t feel as long as the new book.
I wonder what to read next.
