A late coming of age in the Age of Thatcher
Written: Nov 11 '04 (Updated Jul 11 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: expression
Cons: pacing
The Bottom Line: Although my patience was tried, persistence was eventually rewarded.
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty |
Alan Hollinghurst's fourth novel, The Line of Beauty was a surprise winner of the Man Booker Prize a few weeks ago. (David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas was generally expected to get it; I have not read that book but have read the other serious contender, Colm Toibin's The Master, which I think is better than Line of Beauty.)
Hollinghurst's first—and, in my view, best—novel, The Swimming-Pool Library ended in August 1983. Although not a sequel, having none of the same (specific) characters, Line of Beauty begins in that summer. The unheroic protagonist of the book, Nick Guest, has been a friend of a golden boy Toby Fedden at Oxford. Nick is going to begin graduate work in English at the University of London and is incorporated into the Fedden household, though Toby almost immediately moves out to live with his girlfriend. I find it difficult to credit that Nick would be quasi-adopted, not having much in common with any of the Feddens. They certainly do not need his nominal rent, but Nick befriends Toby's manic-depressive younger sister Cat[herine] and the parents rely on Nick to keep her from seriously harming herself.
Gerald, the distracted father, whose business dealings are not clear to Nick (or to this reader), has been swept into Parliament as one of the young Thatcherites. Gerald is ambitious and especially wants the notice and approbation of the Prime Minister (invariable referred to as "The Lady"). It takes him a long time to get Mrs. Thatcher to the Notting Hill mansion. She condescends to attend the silver wedding anniversary in the climax of the second and longest section of the novel, three years later. That party is the high point/ set piece of the novel. Nick gets her onto the dance floor and then goes off to enjoy his greater interests — cocaine, rough trade, another school acquaintance who has become Nick's employer and sort-of lover. In fact, without earlier hits of cocaine, it is unlikely that Nick would have had the nerve to ask Mrs. Thatcher to dance.
The novel has the written equivalent of jump-cuts, but relies little on flashbacks. Less skilled than Hollinghurst, I find it necessary to backtrack. "Guest" is a remarkably unsubtle patronym for the protagonist who is a long-term (four-year) guest of the Feddens, long overstaying Toby's residence in the family home. The first name echoes that of the observers Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby and Nicholas Jenkins in Anthony Powell's multi-volume '"A Dance to The Music of Time." All these Nicks are observers not really a part of the glittering (/meretricious) social whirl. Inside, but not insiders. Fascinated, but not swallowed up and drowned...
In addition to being lodged with the Feddens (included in summer residence in France and family affairs), Nick and his growing cocaine habit are supported by the playboy only son of a nouveau riche (very new and very rich) millionare. The debauched scion, Wani Ouradi, strikes me as a closeted gay variant of Dodie Fayeed ("Wani" does rhyme with "Dodie").
At the start of the novel, Nick, who is open about being gay (including to Toby, though without everconfessing how attracted to Toby he long has been) is eagerly anticipating his first sexual encounter with a man, a black man whose photo forwarded by a personal ad service includes his prized bicycle, which Leo rides everywhere. Nick is very enamored with the contours built and maintained by extensive bicycling and is both in love and in lust with Leo. (The racial specializaiton continues that from two generations of characters in The Swimming-Pool Library, though Leo is developed as a multidimensional character, unlike the sex objects of Hollinghurst's debut novel.)
At Oxford and in his intial acceptance as a member of the Fedden family, Nick is not aware that Wani, who is engaged to be married, is exclusively gay... or that he is already snorting a lot of coke back in the first part of the novel. In the second part, Nick is installed as Wani's secret lover and also procurer of rough trade and sharer of increasing amounts of cocaine. (Wani comes close to being addicted to pornography, too, and to living out the scenarios of the pornography that he absorbs.) Eventually, the reader learns what happened to Leo, and the main post-party of the first part is skillfully knit into the post-party of the anniversary party that got the Prime Minister to the Feddens.
Although explicit about the kinds of sex Nick and Leo and Wani have, the sex scenes occupy very few of the novel's 435 pages. (Line of Beauty is also not a "coming-out novel" in that Nick is openly gay before the beginning of the narrative; being gay is certainly part of his outsider perspective and thrown up at him several times during the course of the novel.) Nick does not discuss his sexuality with Toby or Gerald or Rachel (Gerald's wife). Cat is titillated by knowing that Nick likes to penetrate black bubblebutts. She is more sexually experienced than either Nick or Toby, and more promiscuous. She enjoys shocking her parents and the rich Tories with whom they socialize with sexual partners who are unsuitable in various ways (but all of them are male) . She also revels in saying "what is not said in polite society," but does not tell others what she knows about Nick's sex life and forms of desire.
Perhaps he does not confide enough in Cat, though there are other interpretations of the scandal that eventually embroils everyone, but to analyze what happens in the concluding 1987 part of the novel would definitely constitute "plot spoiling."
I have to say that getting there was a considerable effort. When I bought the novel (before the Booker Prize or the US election), I was less than enthusiastic for a long social comedy of the Thatcherite 1980s (when the poor got poorer but the conservatives who were increasing the gap between rich and poor won landslide votes). Although the devastations of AIDS struck later and not as widely in gay Britain than in the United States, the mid-1980s are not an era for which many gay men—particularly those with experience of earlier times—have nostalgia. Since the US election, it is easier to relate to the dismay at the arrogance and policies of the triumphalist Thatcherites felt by Nick and Cat (though Thatcher had some charisma unlike our own reactionary leaders). Nonetheless, I bogged down in the middle section of the novel. There are too many characters, too many exquisite sentences about unlikeable and uninteresting characters and the lifestyles of the rich and boorish. In particular, I did think that the descriptions of music, especially a recital by a piano prodigy, were unilluminating. Hollinghurst is not Proust, and I wish he had aspired to emulate F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh more, Henry James and Anthony Powell (and Proust) less.
Nick's academic specialty is the work of Henry James, and, with Wadi's backing, he writes a screenplay based on The Spoils of Poynton. Hollinghurst's prose is exquisite enough without the serpentine indirection of Henry James. Like Toibin, Hollinghurst wisely resists the temptation to mimic (or parody) James's prose. Nonetheless, Nick is an innocent in the James tradition (initially a 20-year-old virgin and he remains mystified by how money is made). As Hollinghurst himself said while here on his book-launching tour, there is something very Jamesian in having an "outsider looking in on a world that he finds glamorous and mysterious, and then certain horrible things about it are revealed to him." There are some important figures who are thoroughly unlikeable and most of those who seem likable (Rachel, Toby, Leo, Leo's sister) are not very developed. Even Cat and Wani and Gerald continue to seem somewhat schematic at the end (though in the last scene, Penny suddenly becomes more interesting).
I had been thinking that Hollinghurst was far better at constructing sentences (many lines of beauty) than constructing the book. Although the middle (1986) part drags, the brisker final (1987) part redeems much of that and by the end a grand design—more than the ogee/line of beauty—is evident. There is much to admire in the novel, though I still think that less would have been more and that some extended scenes and "beautiful lines" should have been lopped off.
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A three-hour 2006 BBC miniseries tightened the narrative and showcased outstanding performances. I've written about the adaptation at http://www.epinions.com/content_389505519236.
Recommended:
Yes
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