‘Ode to a Suburban Garden’: Eccentric Narrative and The Stranger’s Child

Abstract

In his review of Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel for The Guardian, Theo Tait contends that The Stanger’s Child ‘treads much of the same ground as its predecessors: class and money, buried histories of gay life in this country, the dreary provinces and the exciting metropolis, with forays into architecture and Victoriana’. These are indeed all familiar themes to readers of Hollighurst’s fiction, yet in his latest offering metropolitan life is virtually passed over altogether. With its action taking place almost entirely on the fringes of London, The Stranger’s Child is, for Hollinghurst, a peculiarly ex-centric narrative. This excision of the metropolis rather parallels the novel’s structure: key historical events—the World Wars, the General Strike, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, AIDS—are never directly described, though their influence on characters, and their gravitational pull on the narrative, is always felt markedly. How does this focus on the suburban and the provincial relate to the telling of history and, in particular, the uncovering of ‘buried histories of gay life in this country’? One the one hand, Hollinghurst appears concerned to present a suburban history—a rare thing indeed as the peripheries are so often perceived as being without history and therefore without value. As the authors of Edgelands Paul Farley and Michael Symonds Roberts assert, it makes little sense to conceive of liminal landscapes as outside history: they are ‘always on the move’, and ‘as difficult to pin down and define as poetry’. Hollinghurst is especially pre-occupied by the continually shifting reputations of different architectural styles and landscapes as well as the myths that are subsequently invested in them. One of the central ironies of the novel is how a Georgian poem, which nostalgically evokes a lost English rural idyll in the manner of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, is actually inspired by a suburban garden. Yet Hollinghurst shows that such suburban habitats are always already ambiguous; they are never ‘pure’, and are always negotiating their position between city and country as well as their class identity. On the other hand, these suburban landscapes both reveal and obscure queer goings on. The poem in question is actually inspired less by the garden than by sexual frolics which took place within its borders, or perhaps just beyond them. There is in the modest architecture of the periphery the possibility of secrecy, with its way of ‘always resolving itself into nooks’, and then, always just beyond it, the promise of a queer pastoral—or, rather, sylvan—idyll. Yet Hollinghurst demonstrates the challenges of recovering queer suburban histories, and suggests a new method for examining such places that has something in common with their very peripherality. Unlike the seemingly more promising metropolitan architectures and landscapes of his earlier novels, with their rich queer archaeologies, surveying these peripheries directly seems to yield little more than a residual melancholy. It is by perusing them obliquely and ex-centrically, that is, to consider always what lies beyond or outside, as well as the personalities and narratives that are obscured by those that have become central and established, that the suburbs begin to reveal some of their secrets, while retaining much of their mystery.