63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Maggie, Charlie, and the Boys, January 6, 2006
This review is from: The Line of Beauty: A Novel (Paperback)
The effusive press comments quoted on the cover and flyleaf of the paperback edition of Alan Hollinghurst's THE LINE OF BEAUTY are totally correct in everything they actually say; they merely fail to mention one of the most important aspects of the book. Hollinghurst writes brilliantly about life among the movers and shakers of Margaret Thatcher's London in the early 1980s. His ability to portray his characters, as one critic puts it, "from just an inch to the left" of how they would see themselves is masterly, and the result is something like the portraits of Goya, a flattering likeness with just a hint of satire. Hollinghurst has perfect pitch when it comes to the social sensibilities and small hypocrisies of the well-bred. As a lineal descendant of Trollope, James, and Forster, he is a well-deserved winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
But none of the reviews quoted in the book mention the gay sex, which is pervasive and often explicitly physical. By portraying the narrator of the book, Nick Guest, as a gay man in an ostensibly straight world, Hollinghurst achieves an oblique angle on the people he observes, moving considerably more than an inch from the axis on which they would ideally see themselves. The glamorous life is glimpsed through a foreground that straight readers might find far from glamorous, especially when it deals with bodily interactions. Ultimately, this becomes essential to the plot, but for a long time it seems merely an authorial device. It is difficult to know whether the author sees these elements as a heightening of the sexual charge, or whether they are deliberately introduced as an antidote to romanticism, and as much an emblem of decadence as the increasingly frequent use of "charlie" (cocaine) by the narrator and his friends. Certainly, the secrecy practised by other characters in the story who have not come out as Nick has done, does seem to point up the falsity of the world in which they cannot admit their preferences.
Not that Nick needs the difference in sexuality to give him detachment. He is presented as a talented boy from a middle-class background who has made some upper-crust friends while at Oxford, so becomes a kind of permanent guest in their lives after college. [This has much in common with my own background, and it was a curious experience to find one of my own Oxbridge friends of this kind, not named but clearly identifiable, appearing as a minor character in the book!] While Nick is clearly thrilled to have been adopted into this world, he remains subtly an outsider, but with an acuteness of perception to compensate for his lack of belonging. His social position is not so very different from that of Kazuo Ichiguro's hero in the first part of
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS -- a peculiarly English awkwardness which both writers capture very well.
The title, THE LINE OF BEAUTY, comes from Hogarth, and refers to the particular elegance of an ogival double-curve. It is emblematic of the genuine aesthetic understanding that is Nick's most appealing quality for this particular reader; the passages talking about art, literature, and music are perceptive and beautifully written. But art is also seen as the province of the rich, who can afford it but don't necessarily appreciate it. As the book goes on, there is increasing emphasis on art objects in a mannerist or rococo phase, seen surely as symbols of decadence, where art is "just make-believe for rich people," as one of the characters says. But the phrase also stands for that fatal line of attraction that leads from one love object to another, or towards some ideal of the beautiful life, that comes crashing down on the characters' heads at the end of this social comedy which turns out to have been a tragedy after all.
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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Writing Is Not the Book, June 19, 2005
Hollinghurst is quoted as having said that if you come to this book looking for your normal sort of "fall from grace" story, you will be disappointed.
He's right.
Hollinghurst has also said that he is more interested in analyzing characters, in protraying them vividly, than in populating his books with people you are likely to identify with or actually care about.
He's right.
Many people have described Hollinghurst as a new genius of prose, as a writer of skill that is long missing in novels from any part of the world.
They're right.
So what's wrong with The Line of Beauty? Not much, but what IS wrong, like a tiny microbe or virus, seems to infect the whole thing.
Read with an eye on the craft of the words, this book is absolutely stunning. Hollinghurst's abilities as a novelist are truly astounding. Even the rather lurid and not particularly tasteful sexual escapades of the novel are crafted with a precision and glory that keep them from wallowing in the muck of which they are made. The affairs, the drugs, the betrayals and the promiscuous, anonymous trysts -- at heart they are what they are, but carved out with Hollinghurst's pen, they become more than that.
Unfortunately, not MUCH more than that.
The deeper meanings, the symbols of the 80s fall from grace, the metaphors woven into the events, these are all admirable evidences of a fine talent, but in the end, the novel seems to stumble over its own style, it clutches at its own class.
During a debate over music, Nick muses this about Strauss: "What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess." This phrase could equally apply to the book in which it is found.
At its heart, the book claims to be about a search for beauty in all its forms. Hollinghurst has said that Nick, the timid protagonist, comes to a realization that the outer beauty of the priviledged men and women with whom he lives disguises a deeper moral ugliness. I found it odd that he would mention beauty of a moral nature, since, in this novel, there really is none, either of a conservative, relativistic, religious, or liberal nature. Nick, caught up in his life of drugs and unchecked sexual hunger, doesn't prove himself to be any more or less beautiful than those people whom he analyzes and with whom he is ultimately disillusioned.
Even if you were to approach this book from the plane of one looking for a totally intellectual experience -- the realm of the observer observing, not judging or conspiring with the story or characters, but simply taking the events and people as they are presented by the almost flawless prose -- well, even then, the sum total of the events turns out to be rather facile, and even the opposite of what it intends. In spite of the gorgeous writing -- Hollinghurst's ability to describe almost anything with a grandiose and supreme ease of grace -- in spite of that, the book itself borders on being rather ugly.
Don't get me wrong. I do not make this assessment because the book is about homosexuality, or political scandals, or the dark deeds of the overpriviledged. I make this assessment because, in the end, Hollinghurst's tale does not rise above its subject matter, even if the writing itself does.
For those of you interested in literature, interested in a reawakening of the style of fine writing and pure form, this book will be a treat, but in the end, is more like a fancy, overpriced appetizer that leaves you wanting much much more.
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