This is the first Alan Hollinghurst I've read, having picked it up as a recommendation, probably because of the Booker Prize link. I will go on to read more - his style so elegant and economical, it did not surprise me when I later learned that he is also a poet and a close friend of Andrew Motion; the poetry beats through the prose.
We experience everything through the eyes and thoughts of the central character Nick Guest. His surname is appropriate in that throughout the four-year time-frame of the novel (1983-1987) Nick is living as a guest in the family home of his well-to-do friend from Oxford days, Toby, and it is in this environment that he and we meet most of the other characters, including Toby's father, the ambitious junior Tory minister Gerald Fedden. There is even a memorable encounter (and a dance, no less) with Mrs Thatcher, referred to within the family as 'The Lady'.
Nick does have a secret life too; we follow him from innocence through to a series of casual homosexual encounters as well as a longer-term gay relationship, sometimes fuelled by cocaine, and shadowed by the then-new threat of Aids. Nick is a libertine but no hell-raiser; he is known by the family as 'the aesthete' and spends most of his time in quiet observation or hardly-noticed participation in the family affairs, until events conspire to provide him with a more dramatic and unwanted role in proceedings as the story moves to its climax.
'The Line of Beauty' works on many levels. It's a superbly-nuanced study of manners in Thatcher's Britain; it's stiletto-stealth satire; it's revealing and frank about the lifestyle adopted by some members of the gay community (though I wearied of the sex, if I may say that without sounding like an over-worked prostitute); and it's an aesthetic delight.
The narrative interiority is for me both a strength and a weakness. Hollinghurst's presentation of the emotional depths and shallow insights of Nick is faultless but Nick's inadequacies in human understanding become ours too - so many of his otherwise brilliant character expositions fail to penetrate to the heart. As a result we get to know Nick inside out, but the supporting cast only outside in. Hollinghurst's intense, masterful use of his chosen narrative device is, paradoxically, what prevents 'The Line of Beauty' claiming an unarguable place as a great book; but it gets close.
This reviewer blogs regularly as Writer in the North.
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