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Summary and Reviews of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst
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  • First Published:
  • Oct 1, 2004, 400 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2005, 400 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

'Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. He writes the best prose we have today'. Winner of the 2004 Booker Prize.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

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    Booker Prize
    2004

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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'.
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