A new offering from the author of “The Line of Beauty”

The Stranger’s Child. By Alan Hollinghurst. Picador; 564 pages; £20. To be published in America in October by Knopf; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ALAN HOLLINGHURST achieved fame in 1988 with “The Swimming-Pool Library”, a novel about gay sex in posh surroundings and social distinctions in Britain. “The Line of Beauty”, his 2004 Man Booker prize-winner, dealt with the same themes in Thatcherite Britain. Now in “The Stranger’s Child”, we start out observing the relationship of two men, one from a suburb, the other from a stately pile. Mr Hollinghurst cannot be accused of inconsistency.

He provides readers with a modern equivalent to Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, albeit with knowing asperity and pastiche. It is a winning formula and proof that the British, while pleading attachment to meritocracy, adore a novel set somewhere with crenellations and an arboretum.

Cecil, a young poet, and his university friend, George, are as one character archly puts it “very attached to each other…in the Cambridge way”. The amount of raw sex in Hollinghurst’s oeuvre gets lighter and lighter with each book: it’s positively vanilla here, despite Cecil’s “celebrated membrum virile”.

A talent for literary pastiche is the real strength. Mr Hollinghurst crafts a credible but somehow awful poem for Cecil, echoing Rupert Brooke’s clammy portentousness. A German sniper sees off Cecil in the first world war, so we soon leave him, stiff and cold in the family chapel. Alas, the novel follows suit.

Having dispatched the most intriguing figure, the reader is left with the rather wet Daphne, George’s sister, who is daft enough to believe that his poem was written for her, rather than as a cipher for his attachment to his male friend. Competing relatives and biographers struggle to sustain our interest, as they vie to control their evanescent “memories of memories”.

As the 20th century unfolds, an ageing cast reinvents and pokes at Cecil, with letters and fragments as ammunition in the wars of literary remembrance. Yet this already feels dated, because the heyday of bookish biography has passed. The competitive quests of A.S. Byatt’s biographers in “Possession” and their ilk seem antiquarian today.

The scope of the novel, from 1913 to the present, is the cause of some confusion. Characters pop up and disappear again, often before we have grasped their purpose. It is all beautifully controlled and mordantly funny, but devoid of warmth—a lot like the gilded, heartless people he is writing about.