Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

Reviewed by PHILIP CULBERTSON


Alan Hollinghurst's work just seems to get better and better. Perhaps that is why his latest novel has won the Booker Prize.

His first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), was described by Edmund White as the best book about gay life ever written by an English author. Subsequent books have continued his description of gay life in London, but also highlight issues of class, age, art, excess, and self-awareness. In a sense, The Line of Beauty picks up where The Swimming Pool Library left off: the summer of 1983, the last summer of its kind there ever was to be, that is, before
Aids changed life irreparably for the British gay community.

What is the line of beauty? Hollinghurst attributes the aesthetic phrase to Hogarth, referring to an ogee, a double-curve with the shape of an elongated S (the novel includes picturesque descriptions of fine antique furniture). But in its multiplex meaning, the phrase could also refer to the point at which a man's lower back meets his ass; a line of cocaine; or completely ironically, the twisted line of British peerage, especially the homophobic Thatcherite Tories.

The story's protagonist admires the beauty of the first, the ogee, lusts after the second, snorts the third, and attempts to pre-empt the blessing of the fourth, even to the point of disguising his active sex life. The interplay between these four meanings is part of what structures the novel in such an intriguing way.

Nick Guest, whose story this is, is the son of a mediocre middle-class dealer in antiques. At Oxford he befriends, via unrequited lust, the son of rising political star Gerald Fedden, and ultimately becomes a live-in guest in the Fedden home in Notting Hill. In his egocentric innocence, Nick believes he is as-much-as a member of the family, failing to notice that the Feddens relate to him as little more than a minder for their mentally-troubled daughter.

The novel is divided into three parts: late-summer 1983, with Nick recently arrived in the Fedden household, but bonking his black Cockney pick-up lover behind the bushes of the estate gardens; 1986, by which time Nick is deeply involved emotionally and sexually with an outrageously wealthy Lebanese boy named Wani (whose father bears a scary resemblance to Mohammed Al Fayed); and 1987, when the secrets and narcissism unravel into death and dismissal.

Many encounters in the unfolding 600-page narrative moved and delighted me, and none more so than when Gerald's philistine dream comes true: the Iron Lady herself, much anticipated in the plot, arrives in Notting Hill for dinner.

Wearing a jacket that makes her look like a country and western singer, Thatcher finds herself swept onto the dancefloor for a boogie with a very coked-up Nick — surely the funniest scene in the book.

This year's cast of Man Booker nominees includes both Holling
hurst and Colm Toibin. Both are gay, of course, and serendipitously, both are nominated for new novels that make significant reference to Henry James, himself gay. Is The Line of Beauty, then, a gay novel? Surely less so than Hollinghurst's
previous three books.

Unlike his earlier work, this novel is as much a portrait of the straight world of post-Falklands Thatcherism as it is of one gay lifestyle of illusion, drugs, and casual sex.

Both worlds are portrayed with equally astute cunning and elegance. Hollinghurst has apparently learned to set gay sex into a historical context, which all sexual activity has anyway (a point ably showcased recently by Annamarie Jagose in Slow Water). Hollinghurst's new book proves that, like so many gay men, he only improves with age.


* Philip Culberston is the director of pastoral
studies at St Johns Theological College, Auckland.


* Picador, $49.95