The subject of “Time Revealing Truth” was a favorite one for Renaissance and Neoclassical artists; Tiepolo, Poussin, Bernini, and many others executed versions of the allegory. But Time, it must be admitted, doesn’t always reveal Truth. Memory is not only self-serving and selective; it is also appallingly unreliable. Someone who wishes to find the truth about the past, the real truth, confronts all but impenetrable barriers. Time may occasionally reveal truth, but it seems just as often to conceal it.
This subject is brilliantly explored by Allan Hollinghurst in his new novel, The Stranger’s Child, a rich and dense tale covering most of the twentieth century and beyond. Using the device of a literary biographer researching a half-forgotten poet, Hollinghurst communicates the sense of fascination we get from delving in to the past, even if the people whose pasts are being explored do not at first seem terribly interesting. For the past is interesting—fascinating—for its own sake alone and so is the human compulsion to resuscitate it.
The event from which all others in this novel flow is a 1913 summer weekend at “Two Acres,” a pleasant house in the suburbs of London. Young George Sawle has brought his Cambridge friend (and secret lover) Cecil Valance home for the weekend to meet his family. Cecil is a cut above the modest George: he is the heir to a baronetcy, a thousand-acre estate, and Corley Court, an extravagant high-Victorian pile. He is also a promising poet, having
