The Line of Beauty

I was amazed how this novel was able to pack such psychological complexity, sheer beautiful language, and tense conflict into what are essentially 10 or so major scenes. If you are into "action" movies, then perhaps this book is not for you, but if you are at all interested in the ways in which we deceive ourselves--and how we even beg to be deceived--then this book is most certainly for you. It is about hypocrisy, and greed and classism, but mostly it is about beauty and deception and idealism, and how the three are a dangerous combination. Yes, there is gay sex. But mostly it is longing, desire, love: everything we pine for in romances, but never get because most romances are drivel. Well this is the exact opposite of drivel. It is literature with a capital "L." A total wonder. I just finished it, but will, in a week's time, probably find myself reading it again just for the sheer poetry and observational energy of the sentences.

Holinghurst has written another exquisite book; riviting story line; clear, well-burnished characters populate London's political landscape (as well as the odd park for trist-like encounters). It is no wonder that the book earned the ManBooker for 2004. Although Nicholar Guest, around whom the story circulates, is gay, this is by no means as 'gay' a novel as Hollinghurst's first book, the Swimming Pool Library (1988) written while he was still a deputy editor at the [London] times Literary Supplement. Coming down from Cambridge with a degree, Guest needs gainful employment and he finds some such in the home of a classmate whose father is a high muckimuck in the Tory Party under Thatcher. While the protagonist explores both his sexual and architectural proclivities as a 'line of beauty' leads him to discover some salient 'truths' about life in the big city, certainly about life within the political and aristocratic circles within which he exists. This novel is the latest of Hollinghurst's efforts - The Swimming Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell - to chronicle the coming of age of late 20th century upper class, well educated, well acquained with drugs a la mode, British men who happen to be gay. All of his efforts are well worth the read. As with A Line of Beauty, The Spell, made the short list for ManBoooker in 1994; unfortnately it did not receive the award. Although A Line of Beauty is, in my mind, not his best work - I vote for The Spell - the book is well deserved of the award; and is well deserved to be read. I look forward to the next Hollinghurst novel!

The effusive press comments quoted on the cover and flyleaf of the paperback edition of Alan Hollinghurst's THE LINE OF BEAUTY are totally correct in everything they actually say; they merely fail to mention one of the most important aspects of the book. Hollinghurst writes brilliantly about life among the movers and shakers of Margaret Thatcher's London in the early 1980s. His ability to portray his characters, as one critic puts it, "from just an inch to the left" of how they would see themselves is masterly, and the result is something like the portraits of Goya, a flattering likeness with just a hint of satire. Hollinghurst has perfect pitch when it comes to the social sensibilities and small hypocrisies of the well-bred. As a lineal descendant of Trollope, James, and Forster, he is a well-deserved winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. But none of the reviews quoted in the book mention the gay sex, which is pervasive and often explicitly physical. By portraying the narrator of the book, Nick Guest, as a gay man in an ostensibly straight world, Hollinghurst achieves an oblique angle on the people he observes, moving considerably more than an inch from the axis on which they would ideally see themselves. The glamorous life is glimpsed through a foreground that straight readers might find far from glamorous, especially when it deals with bodily interactions. Ultimately, this becomes essential to the plot, but for a long time it seems merely an authorial device. It is difficult to know whether the author sees these elements as a heightening of the sexual charge, or whether they are deliberately introduced as an antidote to romanticism, and as much an emblem of decadence as the increasingly frequent use of "charlie" (cocaine) by the narrator and his friends. Certainly, the secrecy practised by other characters in the story who have not come out as Nick has done, does seem to point up the falsity of the world in which they cannot admit their preferences. Not that Nick needs the difference in sexuality to give him detachment. He is presented as a talented boy from a middle-class background who has made some upper-crust friends while at Oxford, so becomes a kind of permanent guest in their lives after college. [This has much in common with my own background, and it was a curious experience to find one of my own Oxbridge friends of this kind, not named but clearly identifiable, appearing as a minor character in the book!] While Nick is clearly thrilled to have been adopted into this world, he remains subtly an outsider, but with an acuteness of perception to compensate for his lack of belonging. His social position is not so very different from that of Kazuo Ichiguro's hero in the first part of WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS -- a peculiarly English awkwardness which both writers capture very well. The title, THE LINE OF BEAUTY, comes from Hogarth, and refers to the particular elegance of an ogival double-curve. It is emblematic of the genuine aest

Call it the British "Angels in America" minus the angels, but Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" can stand on its own, even when compared to Tony Kushner's brilliant play. Both works share a lot in common: they are set in the 80s when the world was changing in a strange way, AIDS has just become the issue, and both have its country politcs in the background (USA: Ronald Regan; UK: Margaret Tatcher). The 2004 MAN Booker Prize winner is a novel that takes a little time to grabs one attention -- but once it does so, it is hard to put it down. It covers a couple of years in the lives of a group of people, all related to Nick Guest, young man who has moved to the elegant house in Notting Hill that belongs to the parents of one of his best friends. This family sort of becomes his second family. But Nick is never really connected to the Feddens, for many reasons. One of them is that they are wealthy and futile, whereas he is not. Another one is the fact they never really deal with his homosexuality. They seem to cope that but never accept it. But politics in England in the 80s play such a major role in the narrative the homosexuality has a supporting part sometimes. The book focus on is the climate of giddy success among well-to-do Tories between the electoral victories of 1983 and 1987. The patriarch Gerald Fedden has just entered Parliament and wants to fulfill another political ambition: to host the PM at home for a party. Eventually when it happens Hollinghurst delivers some of the best pages of social and cultural delight and critic of his novel. For pages and pages he teases his reader in the best possible way, announcing that something big will happen -- but one can never be aware of what will happen. One critic has wisely compared the appearance of "The Lady" to the presence of Kurtz in ''Heart of Darkness,'' who both are invisible until near the end. Hollinghurst has a special obsession for beauty and its forms -- and this is totally explicit in the title of the book. But his prose also has its own beauty. The writer's choose of words is remarkable, as well as the way he builds his sentences. At the same time, Hollighurst gambles with another of his main themes: Henry James. Nick is working on a thesis about this writer, which turns out to be a good excuse to inject some Jamesian comments throughout the narrative. Many readers maybe shocked with the honesty that sexuality is dealt with. This concern only enhances the experience of reading the narrative. Nick's sexually naivety and awakening is believable and never gratuitous. And all the characters have enough personality and humanity to fill a whole book on them. Hollinghurst won a deserved Booker Prize with his novel, which has much more consistence and smartness than last year's "Vernon God Little". Giving the Prize to "The Line of Beauty" brings back the hope that it is indeed a literary prize and not just a fashion contest.

"The Line of Beauty" is the first novel I've read by Alan Hollinghurst and having just finished it I'll make a beeline to read his others. Every chapter of this book is a sheer delight. There are few authors who can move a book at such a torturedly slow pace and still manage a success. The key to "The Line of Beauty" lies in the detail....Hollinghurst unfolds his characters with enormous pathos, keeping their quotes brief and allowing his observations about them to become expanded. Their is a dryness to his writing that seems endemic of British authors but remaining in that style allows the flavor of his characters to come through with great shades of color. As told through the eyes of the protagonist, Nick, Hollinghurst is able to steer him through a feel that combines an Edwardian England with the present. Nick grows up, to be sure, but he does so in a wafting way, sensitive to the world and his growing self-awareness. If Nick wears rose-colored glasses in the beginning, he has neatly discarded them at the end. "The Line of Beauty" is really a book about connections...connections in a changing world of friends, lovers, family, illness and death. There is a general sadness that accompanies this book, as it should. Alan Hollinghurst reminds us, through the seriousness of Nick's story, how tenuous we all are in each other's care, no matter what our "standing" is in society... and how far we still have to go.