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61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
Intersecting curves, 4 April 2005
"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.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
You must be Henry......, 13 Sep 2005
If you like Henry James - and congratulations on persisting with the old Master - you will like this pastiche of the James style. This means the reader must expect and tolerate a great amount of vagueness, approximation and refined emotions dissected - but for no clear reason other than it is a clever thing to do. The main character is Nick Guest who is indeed a guest in the London house of an ambitious Tory MP during the Thatcher years of the Eighties. Guest manages to sponge off the family for the best part of this decade while conducting some intense sexual adventures, first with low life Leo and then with the painfully beautiful, rich and effete son of a self-made millionaire Lebanese supermarket owner.
You have to like reading about the vacuous rich, with nothing to do other than pursue their own egoistic ambitions and no great intelligence with which to do it, to appreciate this novel. The homage to James though is mainly stylistic and in comparison to James himself somewhat James Lite. What reader today has the stamina and concentration to follow the typical James juggling act over two pages before he agrees to release the point. Yes, Hollinghurst can and consistently does display a remarkable talent for teasing out of situations such as a superficially dull and boring musical soiree the point and counter-point of people's feelings. His inventiveness with words, his elegant and intelligent use of language is an accomplishment rare in contemporary British novels. On the other hand you have to tolerate a great deal of the word 'seem' and the phrase 'as if': these clang ad nauseam through the novel like a monotonous church bell. Then there is the repeated use of 'odd' or 'oddly' and 'vague' and 'a sense of'. So what we have here is a novel that seems to be about beauty but leaves you with the oddly persistent feeling that there is some vague motive strangely never explained: as if fulfilment will always elude us.
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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
A prizewinner . . . but no masterpiece, 14 Mar 2006
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.
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