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(More customer reviews)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 aesthetic understanding that is Nick's most appealing quality for this particular reader; the passages talking about art, literature, and music are perceptive and beautifully written. But art is also seen as the province of the rich, who can afford it but don't necessarily appreciate it. As the book goes on, there is increasing emphasis on art objects in a mannerist or rococo phase, seen surely as symbols of decadence, where art is "just make-believe for rich people," as one of the characters says. But the phrase also stands for that fatal line of attraction that leads from one love object to another, or towards some ideal of the beautiful life, that comes crashing down on the characters' heads at the end of this social comedy which turns out to have been a tragedy after all.
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