The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst Picador, 616pp, £16.99
ISBN 033048320X
Alan Hollinghurst's elegant fourth novel captures a particular kind of privileged gay lifestyle during the Thatcherite 1980s. Nick Guest is an unexceptionable young man who has remained a virgin throughout his undergraduate years at Oxford, nursing an unrequited crush on his straight friend Toby Fedden. After starting a PhD on Henry James at the University of London, Nick stays as a lodger-cum-guest in the Fedden family's grand household in west London presided over by Gerald, a bumptious but charming junior minister in Maggie's triumphant second administration.
Nick falls in love, in a Brideshead-ish sort of way, with the Fedden family: with Gerald's beautiful, remote wife and with the troubled, vulnerable daughter. He also falls in love with London's liberated and liberating gay scene, finally losing his virginity to a black man called Leo in one of the exclusive resident-keyholders' gardens of Notting Hill. A golden age of beauty and adventure ensues which is to be occluded by an ugly political backlash and Aids.
The title is taken from Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, though Hollinghurst has probably insinuated a cocaine reference in there, too. And it is in the aesthetic realm that the author ventures his own, faintly pedagogic statements: at a piano recital at Gerald's house, the vivacissimamente marking for a piece by Beethoven is "marvellous", and Schubert's "stream-like" E flat major Impromptu "requires such unfaltering evenness of touch". This unfaltering evenness is what Hollinghurst brings to his own performance. When Nick thinks about Leo's body, he can hear the "love-chord":
It was high and low at once, an abysmal pizzicato, a pounce of the darkest brass, and above it a sheen of strings. It seemed to knock him down and fling him up all in one unresisted gesture.
Hollinghurst's writing has a clarity, an unforced quality contained within the boundaries of a cool emotional reticence. For the most part, he is reluctant to venture into high tragedy or low comedy. Where his first three novels had, each in their own way, a powerful sense of pain and drama, this gives the impression of returning to a wound after it has healed. Even the devastation of Aids is contained within this technical glaze and finish.
Nick's rent-free berth gives him remarkable access to the centre of British political life, a privileged spectacle he treats with a dazed irony. At one of Gerald's parties, Margaret Thatcher herself is a guest and Nick gets to dance with her. Hollinghurst describes this scene with such shrewd flair that you wonder why she does not appear more often in British fiction. Yet for all the homophobia and bigotry of the Thatcherite Tories, Nick and Gerald are largely tolerant of each other. Watching Gerald on Question Time, Nick is dismayed to hear him spout the fatuous party line on Clause 28, but also dismayed that his own views are caricatured by a tiresome, bearded lefty on the same panel.
Gerald himself is treated leniently. At a country fete in his Northamptonshire constituency, he becomes fanatically competitive in a wellington-boot-throwing contest, and manages to get the mayoress's name wrong. But something in Holling-hurst's restraint - fastidiousness, even - will not allow him to turn this episode into full-blown comedy in the manner of, say, Jonathan Coe or Tim Lott, who have written more dyspeptic novels about the 1980s. (The nearest Hollinghurst comes to the vulgarity of a joke is imagining how Henry James would describe the erection of one of his pick-ups: "it was of a grandeur".)
Nick's lovers are very different. Leo is the gentle, humorous older guy who works in a government office; Wani is the spoilt, drawling, exquisitely beautiful man who intends to use his father's money to make films or publish magazines, but has a philistine tendency that secretly appals Nick. Of the two, the elder is far more sympathetic, and for me it was a pity that declasse Leo, with his warm and exactingly religious mother, is jettisoned in favour of the essentially charmless Wani.
But all of my reservations are offset by the pure pleasure and exhilaration of Alan Hollinghurst's writing, always so stylish and poised, with generous cadences of sorrow and delight.
Peter Bradshaw's latest novel is Dr Sweet and His Daughter, published by Picador
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