Anti-social intimacy: Alan Hollinghurst has a gift for depicting family fracture 

Alan Hollinghurst's novel is a showcase for bravura writing. Such praise could be off-putting: the glitter of fine writing often elevates style over substance. Perhaps I should therefore stress straight away that The Stranger's Child is not only written with extraordinary beauty, but is also exceptionally readable — and this even though the narrative is fragmented by chronological leaps, the characterisation disrupted by shifts in perspective. The author's imagination is teased by the extent to which we are strangers to each other, and the way in which the past becomes strange to the present. His genius lies in his ability to intrigue the reader, too, suggesting the hinterland of a secret, vivid life, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, as it were. Hollinghurst is superbly skilled at heightening awareness of the liminal: a man "listening to the silence" beside his lover's tomb hears "chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds — birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind in the roof than the pulse in his ear." 

The novel begins, in conventional fashion, with a visit. It opens in 1913, when 16-year-old Daphne Sawle is waiting for her brother, George, to bring an aristocratic friend from Cambridge to his suburban house, "Two Acres". Like so many of the characters in this book, Daphne feels herself marginalised: hearing the approaching laughter of the undergraduates, she feels herself "not in on the joke." Her youth and sex exclude her. 

Naturally, readers will immediately suspect that there is more to the friendship between George Sawle and the supercilious young poet, Cecil Valance, than meets the eye of a 16-year-old sister in 1913. Daphne knows that she is missing out on something,  hearing the faintest of sounds, a moan, some giggles — from the hammock in the garden after dark.

But the whole visit is alive with nuances, possibilities, as the middle-class household react to their confident intruder: the widowed mother, drinking just a bit too much; the sweetly dull elder brother, Hubert, trying to fill the place of the man of the house with the help of his new moustache, defensively jocose ("I'm no expert on poetry"); the house-boy, Jonah, anxiously excited by being promoted upstairs to look after Cecil during his stay, uncertain of his duties, and puzzled by what he finds in the wastepaper basket (why has George written "Veins" to Cecil, "if that was how you spelt it, ‘Viens'";  and why is there a torn-up poem about the hammock in the garden?) There are shades of the black comedy found in Molly Keane's Good Behaviour in this opening section.

Hollinghurst excels at evoking the liminal moment just before a first, sexually charged touch — that moment of being shiveringly aware of the boundary between skin and self. And even within a relationship, one may, excitingly, find oneself touching a stranger. George, in thrall to Cecil and the "airy aggressions" of his assumed superiority, finds his "secret mischief had something rougher in it". Yet this hint of a dark unknown only makes Cecil more alluring.