To adapt is to choose, the French politician Pierre Mendès-France might have said, had he turned his mind away from governing the Fourth Republic and towards turning novels into plays. And in adapting Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty, the writer Jack Holden has made a series of choices, some necessary, others fatal. To adapt is also always going to mean to cut, and reams of Hollinghurst’s 500-page novel have been torn away: a contraction from panorama to something more like melodrama. In Hollinghurst’s novel, one character’s “view of gay sex” is said to be “both tragic and cartoonlike”. The same uncomplimentary phrase might apply to this welcome but ill-judged adaptation.
The beatification of Hollinghurst’s novel into a modern classic is now almost complete, the literary papacy of prizes, reviewers, TV producers and “best novel” list-makers having reached solid consensus. Hollinghurst’s story has the combined virtues of the period piece and the masterpiece, a story about the Eighties upper class, the Aids crisis and Thatcherism, which is also about class and aesthetics, young love and young death. The protagonist Nick Guest is a provincial graduate who has been lusting after his tragically straight but wonderfully posh friend Toby Fedden since he first spotted him in Oxford at the Worcester College porters’ lodge. And his lodging at Toby’s Notting Hill home – for the summer of 1983, and then for a further four years – permits him to lust after the entire Fedden family. Gerald Fedden MP, Toby’s father, gives him peripheral access to the power elite of the age. But Nick is resolute that what he loves is their house(s), their piano, their beautiful things, the same things that he quickly begins to confuse with the beautiful men he successively falls in love with.
If that all sounds terribly subtle, Holden’s adaptation isn’t. “Are you the poof?” is how the audience is unmissably informed of Nick’s sexuality, a question that is doubly out of tune, coming from Toby Fedden’s sister Catherine, who becomes Nick’s friend and confidante. Nick’s characterisation is played slightly flat too. The difference can be found in a haircut: in the novel, Nick admires his blond curls in the mirror; here he has quite a lame, post-schoolboy parting, part of a general overplaying of his nerdiness and understating of his pretty charm. And if Nick comes out flat, the other characters are much too sharp. Toby becomes a sort of braying, hoop-jerseyed lummox, and Gerald is made much too fretful and stupid (in his first scene, he is supposed to be unfamiliar with the name Henry James).
These shifts in character have structural effects, and Holden gives himself the liberty to make slight but vital plot changes on their basis. With Nick rendered something of a over-eager ingenue, his erotic life is streamlined and simplified. He leaves his first lover, the working-class Leo, for an Oxford contemporary, Wani Ouradi, in a relationship fuelled by threesomes, cocaine and idle pleasure. In Hollinghurst’s novel, the substitution isn’t direct, and Nick’s act is crueller: only when Leo’s family arrive to tell Nick that he’s died of Aids does Nick confess that it was a “glimpse” of unknown illness that broke them apart, a challenge to Leo’s “beauty” that he could not stomach. In this way, rather than make Nick purely the victim of his society, Hollinghurst more boldly makes him complicit with it.
But Hollinghurst had a magnificent prose style at his service, with all its powers to lead, and hint and withhold. Holden has attempted that trick of supplying Hollinghurst’s narration to his stage characters, and this provides the play’s finer moments (Nick’s final walk down the streets of Notting Hill, a scene that no one who has read the novel can forget, is given moving tribute here). When we slip into pure Holden, though, the lines slacken, as on Nick and Leo’s first date: “It looks dingy as hell in there… Do you think hell will be dingy? We’re both going to find out.”
Perhaps we can forgive a play for not having attained the miracles of free indirect discourse. And even if it doesn’t survive in its own right, it will have fulfilled a nobler service: sending us back to the book.
[Further reading: Rewilding Rory Stewart]
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This article appears in the 06 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Exposed: Britain's next maternity scandal