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Book Reviewed by:The Line of Beauty, winner of last year's Mann Booker prize, is
Hollinghurst's fourth novel following The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The
Folding Star (1994) and The Spell (1998). Hollinghurst has
gained a reputation for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect
prose, but here his emphasis is more on, what he sees as, the vast divide
between the ruling class and everyone else. The book is
divided into three parts, all set in London during the 1980s, the decade defined
in many ways by Margaret Thatcher (Conservative/Tory Prime Minister from
1979-1990). In the first part, set in 1983, we meet our protagonist Nick
Guest, freshly arrived from Oxford and living in the house of Tory MP Gerald
Fedden, at the request of Gerald's son Toby. Nick quickly becomes the
confidante of Catherine, Toby's manic-depressive sister, loses his virginity to
a black council worker and enters a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at
ancestral homes attended by top financiers and politicians. During the
next four years we follow Nick as he goes (in the words of Kirkus Reviews) 'from
a virginal 20-year-old to a wizened 24-year-old'.
As many reviewers point out, Nick is less interesting as a character as he
is as an observer, much as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is more
interesting for his observations of the 'careless people' than as a character in
his own right. Reviewers compare The Line of Beauty to the writing
of Trollope, Waugh, Proust and Henry James (the latter comparison is
unsurprising considering the 400-plus pages of the novel are littered with
references to Henry James).
It has received glowing reviews from many; for
example The Observer (UK) describes it as 'a classic of our times… The work of a great English stylist in full
maturity; a masterpiece'.
As always, you can read a range of reviews at BookBrowse, plus a substantial
excerpt which, to the best of my knowledge, is exclusive to BookBrowse at this
time.
This review
first ran in the November 9, 2005
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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