Flowers

Secret Paragraphs: On Alan Hollinghurst

10.02.12

Returns, more directly but also equivocally, to the preoccupations of that first book. Where the early novel exhumed a homoerotic English past, the new one proceeds in reverse, tracing the vanishing of a less defined, more polymorphous version of same-sex love, first through suppression and then, paradoxically, through acceptance and openness.

Despite its many comic touches, the book has a distinctly elegiac mood. Its central character, the poet Cecil Valance, is dead before the second act; others grow old before our eyes as the novel foreshortens time, dipping in and out of their lives from 1913 to 2008. The final section opens at a memorial service where the mourners are addressed by a queer theorist, whom we last met as an embarrassed schoolboy. The epigraph to that section—“No one remembers you at all”—is from “In Memoriam Alfred Lord Tennyson,” a poem by the Scottish writer Mick Imlah, who also died too young and to whom the book is dedicated; part of Tennyson’s own “In Memoriam” features in the novel and lends Hollinghurst his title. The memorials open into one another like rooms in a country house; like the book’s various assessments and accounts of Cecil Valance’s work, none are final or definitive.

Source: The Nation.