Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35621 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Review
"'A classic of our times... The work of a great English stylist in full maturity; a masterpiece' Observer"

Sunday Times, 'PICK OF THE WEEK'
'Surveying the era's self-interested mood from the highest social vantage point, Hollinghurst's book is [an] immaculate time capsule.'

Financial Times
Must rank among the funniest [novels] ever written about Thatcher's Britain, while remaining one of the most tragically sad.

Customer Reviews

Intersecting curves
"It's about someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it's bleak, but then I think it's probably a very bleak book, even though it's essentially a comedy." This is Nick Guest, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst's marvellous fourth novel, actually speaking about Henry James' book "The Spoils of Poynton", which he has been turning into a (doomed, of course) film script. However, in a typical instance of Hollinghurst's scalpel-sharp irony, both the reader and Nick himself realise just as he speaks these words that he might as well be discussing his own narrative.

Like a lot of people, I was mildly surprised (not having read the book) when it won the Booker prize, and at first I wasn't convinced: social satire has arguably been done to death, and many of us would probably rather forget the whole yuppie, Thatcherite era. However, there is far more to this book - which is indeed surprisingly bleak despite often being laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes in the same paragraph - than mere social satire. The appropriately named Nick Guest is a rather impressionable young gay man who finds himself attached to the family of his university pal Toby Fedden, who is terribly nice but frightfully posh and unequivocally straight. The Fedden family - including father Gerald, an upwardly-mobile Tory MP and mother Rachel who comes from Old Money - find it quite handy to have Nick around as official Gay Buddy and unofficial minder for their mentally unstable daughter Catherine. However, Nick's affairs are more complicated than they seem, and while on the surface he is all polished charm, he is becoming ever more deeply embroiled in a damaging clandestine relationship with millionaire playboy Wani Ouradi, including random threesomes and heavy cocaine use. It doesn't exactly require rocket science to see that Nick is headed for disaster.

The title is another lovely example of Hollinghurst's irony. On one level it is a cheap pun: a lot of the "beautiful lines" here consist of white powder, snorted through a rolled-up banknote (indeed, Wani Ouradi explicitly describes a cocaine fix as "a Line of Beauty" which is clearly something of an In Joke between Nick and himself). However, on a deeper level, it describes Nick's whole approach to life. The original "Line of Beauty" is the S-shaped double curve, which was thought by William Hogarth to be the model of aesthetic perfection in painting and architecture, and which is also seen by Nick in the writings of Henry James. Nick is working in a half-hearted way on a Ph.D. thesis concerning James, and Hollinghurst's novel contains many conscious tributes to the Master and his work. Nick's life is filled with up-curves and down-curves: the most striking example of this is perhaps a revealing dream in which he sees himself climbing a double staircase, half of which is a grand ceremonial space in some great house, the other half a squalid back-stairway in the servants' quarters. "Small doors, flush with the panelling ... gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom." This is clearly a metaphor for Nick's double life: the charm and polish of his public life concealing the utter mess of his private life.

But why should the reader care? Well, because for all his apparent selfishness and his parasitic existence, Nick is a strangely likeable character. Despite his constant pursuit of hedonistic pleasure and aesthetic beauty, it isn't entirely true to say that he "loves things more than people". He actually loves a number of people: his first boyfriend, a black council worker; the troubled and manipulative Wani; manic-depressive Catherine Fedden; indeed, the Fedden family as a whole. The tragedy is that his basic dishonesty about his life (he is always pretending to be something he isn't) induces a sort of moral paralysis, so that he is somehow never able to actualise his love for these various people, and ends up letting almost everyone down in a variety of painfully complex ways.

In addition to this, Hollinghurst sets Nick's small personal tragedy against the backdrop of a much bigger tragedy. As well as being the era of Margaret Thatcher, the Eighties were of course the era of AIDS, and the Plague casts a long and sinister shadow over the whole book. In some ways, the final few chapters become a sort of Anthem for Doomed Youth, and powerfully bring home the sheer human cost of the epidemic.

So, in a year with a particularly strong Booker shortlist, did this one really deserve the Big Prize? Yes, I would say, by a whisker.

Stunningly Elegant Prose
At the time of writing I am appalled to see that the review star rating is only 3.5 stars; it is most definitely a 5***** star work of literature.
When I picked up this book and began to read I was already aware of the homosexual theme and I really did not have any high expectations. However I have to say that, for me, this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant and evocative English, shimmering phrases and a magnetic storyline. Don't miss the chance to read this work of art.

A prizewinner . . . but no masterpiece
I have to admit that I was prompted to buy this book because of the Booker prize it won. I read "The Swimming Pool Library" and was moved by some of the stylistic fireworks in that, so I was looking forward to some similar stylistic turns in "The Line of Beauty". Hollinghurst certainly delivers style, but little substance, and I felt little sympathy for any of his characters, let alone the principal protagonist, Nick Guest. While descriptions are minute and highly detailed, very little "happens", and in that way I guess the novel can be likened to those of Henry James. However, it has to be said that a great deal of gay sex happens, graphically unnecessary, provoking in this reader a heavy sense of tedium. There is an equally large helping of aesthetic pretention encompassing music, painting and furniture, mainly in the mouth of Mr Guest. Hollinghurst's subtle delineation of a particular stratum of English society at a particular point in time (the 1980s) is very well done, although one is left incredulous when he introduces real characters (Lady Thatcher) into his fictional landscape. Nevertheless, the book is often witty, sometimes savage, expressed in beautifully written prose. Ultimately, one feels little or nothing for the cast of characters, and by the end one is hugely tired of the simpering, vain and smug prat Nick Guest, so that his cum-uppance is something of a delight to be savoured, notwithstanding the highly ambiguous final page, which I read several times trying to work out just what it is that Hollinghurst is saying about Nick's fate. All in all, I'm glad I read it, but it is nowhere near as earth-shattering as some reviewers would have us believe.