'The Stranger's Child,' Alan Hollinghurst

THE STRANGER'S CHILD, by Alan Hollinghurst. Alfred A. Knopf, 435 pp., $27.95.

Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, his first since winning the Man Booker Prize for "The Line of Beauty" seven years ago, opens in the suburbs of London, on a summer afternoon in 1913. George Sawle, a middle-class student at Cambridge, is coming home for the weekend with his new university friend, Cecil Valance, a published poet from a privileged aristocratic family. The Sawles -- widowed mother Freda, brother Hubert and teenage sister Daphne -- are abuzz with anticipation.

As the weekend unfolds, we discover George's secret passion for Cecil, and Daphne's own romantic infatuation with the posh houseguest. We see Cecil and George conspire to wander off in the woods for what they winkingly call "a bit of a rough-house" and witness an unexpected kiss between Cecil and Daphne in the darkened garden, an encounter freighted with ambiguous promise. Just what is Cecil up to? The weekend inspires a lyric poem, "Two Acres," which the poet names for the quaint Sawle house and dedicates to Daphne. "She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered," Hollinghurst writes, "at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph."

If all this sounds like an Edwardian twist on "Brideshead Revisited," just wait. After 100 pages, "The Stranger's Child" -- the title comes from a Tennyson poem -- makes a sudden leap into the future. In the second section we're not initially sure where we are, or who the new characters are, but gradually we recognize the Valance family home, Corley Court, and ascertain that more than a decade, and a World War, have passed. "Two Acres" -- the "bloody, bloody poem" Freda calls it, for she is here on a visit -- is now recited by English schoolchildren, and the lives of the Sawles and the Valances are more entwined than ever -- though not, perhaps, in the ways we might have expected.

Hollinghurst continues in this fashion -- establishing a moment in time, letting us puzzle out the connections to an ever-receding past, and then jumping forward again. The novel brings us right up to the present day, when the players of that summer weekend in 1913 are gone and two generations of descendants and literary biographers are fascinated by the mysteries of Cecil Valance. It's the age of iPhones and text messages and Web searches, and, as an antique book dealer blithely observes to Daphne's adult granddaughter, "all information is retrievable."

Except, of course, that it isn't. A running motif in this witty and ultimately very moving novel is that certain truths -- like the gay relationships of that earlier time, perhaps all human desires -- are unrecordable and, to some extent, unknowable. The past and the present form a kind of palimpsest that leaves neither wholly legible.

The book raises many such ideas, but they sit lightly on the page and never dampen the vibrant pleasures of Hollinghurst's prose or his sparkling dialogue. There are echoes of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen and others, but "The Stranger's Child" is a Great English Novel in its own right, and a tantalizing read.