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Alan Hollinghurst

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The Line Of Beauty Paperback – International Edition, January 1, 2004

by Alan Hollinghurst (Author)

4.1 1,498 ratings

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Alan Hollinghurst's book takes up where his previous acclaimed work, The swimming-pool library ends. The line of beauty traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens as the Thatcher boom-years unfold.

Print length

501 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Picador
Publication date

January 1, 2004
Dimensions

5.31 x 1.38 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0330427377
ISBN-13

978-0330427371
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First Edition (January 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 501 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330427377
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330427371
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.38 x 8.5 inches

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4.1 1,498 ratings

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Foster Corbin

Hollinghurst's Best Novel

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2004

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Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, winner of the Booker Prize, is a beautifully written, richly nuanced work and certainly the best of his four novels. The action covers four years during the Margaret Thatcher years from 1983 to 1987 in the lives of one Nick Guest, aptly named, a recent Oxford graduate and in love with all things beautiful, sex, wealth and all the things that money makes happen; the Fedden family: Gerald, a conservative Member of Parliament, his wife Rachel, his children Toby, Nick's friend, and Catherine; Leo; Wani and a host of other lesser characters. The Prime Minister herself makes a brief appearance.

This novel obviously is a tribute to Henry James. Nick is doing graduate studies on the style of James. There are referenes, some quite funny, all through the novel to the writer and to many of his novels. There is a clever scene, for example, when Nick and Wani do a line of coke (beauty?) on a book of James criticism. In a passage reminiscent of James' indirectness on the death of Poe, ("The extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him") Nick wonders how James would have described a certain character's healthy member: "If he [James] had fingered so archly at beards and baldness, the fine paired saliences of his own appearance. . . Nick said, 'Oh, it was. . . of a dimension.'" Just as in James' novels-- Ezra Pound is quoted as saying THE SPOILS OF POYNTON was a novel about furniture-- style and class are important to these characters. The sitting arrangements at fancy dinners mean everything. This novel, however, is more more than a brittle look at money and manners among the wealthy. It is ultimately about betrayal, sickness and death, the cynicism associated with political ambition and the tragedy of wrong choices. Nick is ultimately brought low; his tragic flaw is that he chooses the wrong people for his extended family.

A master of language, Hollinghurst can describe a character or create a mood with one or two words: A piano tuner is a cardiganed sadist. Wani is simply a "closeted cokehead". A woman has blonde hair in expensive confusion. Nick's calves and thighs ache with "guilty vigour". Rachel's dark hair has "candid streaks of grey". The author also writes paragraph after paragraph of beautiful, insightful prose. Take the example of Nick as a gay man not being honest with his parents, whom he isn't very kind to: "And Nick thought, really the poor old things, they do as well as they can; but for a minute he almost blamed them for not knowing he was going to Europe with Wani, and for making him tell them a plan so heavy with hidden meaning. It wasn't their fault that they didn't know-- Nick couldn't tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never wholly benign, since they were aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his mother said, a whatsit." Finally, even though there have been dozens of novels written about AIDS and we who are living have long since gotten past the hopelessness of the early years of the epidemic, Hollinghurst is able to recreate the utter horror we experienced on hearing of the first deaths of our friends and loved ones.

This is a fine novel indeed. It's a shame that in many bookstores, at least in the United States, it will be stocked in the "gay" section or "alternative lifestyles", whatever that means. Of course Ian McEwan's novels are never found in the "straight novel" section; neither is THE SON ALSO RISES to be found on the "Caucasian male novel" shelf. Maybe Shakespeare's Puck was right for saying what fools we mortals be.

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pjf

people are beautiful because we love them, not the reverse

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2013

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SPOILER ALERT

Middle-class but upwardly hopeful Nick Guest comes to Tory MP Gerald Fedden's house first as a vacation houseminder, and ostensible watcher of the unstable daughter Catherine (Cat). Nick is in pursuit of beauty of a certain type. Beauty is in many things, but Nick is enthralled by beauty as manifested in privileged lives and its beautiful things.

Invited to stay after the vacation as a useful dogsbody, he gets to be the hanger on of wealth, and dabbler in their society. Always obsequious, he becomes a foil for family head and MP Gerald's boasting, a constant reassurance and dutiful quasi-son to the mother Rachel (he's much more sympathetic to her than to his own mother, who he is vaguely ashamed of) and a companion and minder to the manic-depressive Cat.

Nick's biggest problem, as a character, is that he is such a sycophantic bluenose. With his labor friends, he reviles Thatcher, and comments negatively on Gerald. To Gerald and his friends and relations, he acts the supportive, respectful Tory. This chameleon-like character makes him hard to respect.

Supposedly working on getting an advance degree on Henry James at UCL in London, he seems more in pursuit of love. But after dabbling in a relationship with middle class clerk - who it is foreshadowed will dump him because he has no money -- he becomes a kept boy for a rich Lebanese millionaire, and former Oxford classmate Wani Ouradi. Nick's finances are tied to his tentative relationship with Ouradi; his living and personal situation tied to his relationship with the Feddens. While other rich companions from his graduate class are starting lives, making names and fortunes, middle-class Nick's can't leave the mein of his college companions but can't afford it himself, (he was a scholarship student at Oxford) so remains stuck in sycophantic roles to stay in that social set.

Nick was enthralled with Henry James, but the real line of beauty is more enthralling than its fictional dissection. Instead Nick helps start up Wani's magazine/film company OGEE (named after the line of beauty arch). But Wani is something of a dilettante, more interested in cocaine, porn and sex. Nick's job is something of a pose. Wani goes through a lot of cocaine, a lot of rent boys, a lot of sex with Nick. He gives Nick a salary and car, while they do tacit work on the magazine and a film script. But Wani openly reviles Nick as just another one of the many paid sluts who takes his money. Nick basically is a respectable looking, safe, but hidden sexual companion, no more acknowledged than the anonymous rent boys.

Nick constantly professes love to his lovers and adopted family. But none take Him seriously as if sensing his shallowness. Indeed, often the sentence after Nick professes love to someone, he wonders at himself for doing so. Whatever these relationships are, they aren't love. His first "lover", it is hinted at, trades Nick up for someone with more funds, before Nick snags Wani, wanting to love him for his physical beauty, even knowing Wani's faults. There's convenience, and a bit of regard, but no real tie.

Similarly, Nick tells Catherine that he loves her family, but he's there for a job as well as a minder to Catherine, a general dogsbody, and an impressionable and appreciative mirror reflecting their wealth. Because Nick loves the Fedden's privileged life, he gives it more brilliance, a reflective glow. Therein lies his real usefulness. Oxford educated and a quasi Don, he offers a tacit legitimacy in his otherwise middle class admiration that someone else wouldn't be able to offer (even perhaps get in the door). Gerald shows off to him, and uses him as a verification of their own wealth and privilege. Nick's basically just a different kind of slut for the Feddens.

Meant to be a sort of touchstone, Catherine reviles pretense, babbles of speaking truths. She's angry that Nick doesn't leave Wani because their relationship must be kept hidden. When he tells her he stays with Wani because he finds him so physically beautiful -- she tells him that people shouldn't be loved because they are beautiful. That people are beautiful because we love them.

Nick only usefulness requires being a convenient reflective foil for beauty, but that means keeping ugliness hidden -- Gerald's indiscretions, Wani destructive lifestyle, etc. When Catherine, in a manic phase, blurts out some of these truths to the press, Nick's only usefulness then is as a sort of scapegoat. Wani, now dying of AIDS, pays Nick off in his will, but never speaks of love. And Nick discovers there was never any love in these relationships, nor any beauty. But has he learned his shallow quest was in vain?

The story ends in ambiguity. Both Nick's lovers succumb to AIDS. We don't know if Nick is HIV positive. In the film, the impression is left that he has been lucky in that, even as he still searches, clueless, for beauty. In the book, which goes a bit more darkly into Nick's insincerities and obsequiousness, Nick believes he will become positive as well. Both end with Nick, and the rest of the characters not having learned much. Adversity hasn't made them better. Rather their own flaws have brought them all down. So it is hardly a positive story. Even Catherine, who reveals others truths and secrets, does it from a manic sense of mischievousness, and not from any sense of moral certainty. (One telling scene is of her sitting in her Uncle's French manoir telling a multi-millionaire, who didn't contribute more than fifty pence to a church restoration that he has too much money. When he asks her (and she has a significant inheritance) what she gave, she claims she had no money on her.)

Some reviewers, and I think the author, make a thing of that Nick's troubles may have to do with homophobia. I didn't see that. The gap between Nick and the Feddens, even between Nick as a potential "mate" for Wani was more financial and cultural than gender oriented. Nick was a hanger on, a sycophant, a leech, because he thirsted after what he saw as a beautiful lifestyle. Gerald was brought down by a financial scandal, then by a petty affair with his secretary. When the news of Nick's sexuality came out in the papers, it wasn't as if everyone in Gerald's circle didn't know Nick was gay. Nick never made a secret of it, except to Wani's father. Gerald flies in a fury at Nick because he thinks that Nick told his daughter about Gerald's affair with his secretary, that Nick had secret knowledge of. And that Cat blabbed to the papers. Without that, Gerald might have survived the financial scandal. But Cat discerned that herself.

In his rage Gerald includes a lot of slurs against gays, as well as against middle class opportunists, etc, when he reviles Nick. Certainly Nick's being gay was a central part of his life, but I don't think it was all that central to the plot's denouement. To me, that had to do more with character, not gender orientation. Nick's problems were because he didn't build a life of his own, but instead based his life on being a hanger on for others, attracted by a lifestyle he had no legitimate ownership of. His father was a buyer and seller of antiquities, a caretaker of ancient clocks in mansions. Nick didn't want to come to the mansions merely as a winder of clocks, or to even buy and sell the clocks. He wanted to live in the mansions.

In the end, he might have learned that beautiful things don't necessarily make for beautiful people. And even with beautiful people, that beauty is only skin deep. But that too is left ambiguous. These characters end the book no better, in most cases much worse, and with no more insight, than when they entered. It's a hard book to like, for that reason. But the characters are so clearly drawn, (even if they are rather shallow, unworthy characters) that you want something more to have happened. I think the author has a dislike for the period and these characters, and doesn't believe anything good should come out of it. One of the most striking scenes is when the housekeeper tells Nick she always suspected he was no good. Nick is stunned, but as reader we have to be in tacit agreement, having seen the false part Nick has often played in all his relationships. Still, the lack of any positive resolution means that the characters stay in your head because you wish it ended otherwise.

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Richard L.

Don't read the introduction, it's full of spoilers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2023

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This is an exceptional book which is unfortunately compromised by the introduction which includes a plot summary. In fairness the plot is not the main quality of the book but nevertheless, why would a publisher open a novel with a complete set of spoilers? I realised this halfway through the and stopped, then re-read it after finishing the book. Although I agree with everything Sebastian Faulks says in his well-crafted introduction, I just don’t want to know the plot before I start.

That aside it is a fabulous book with exquisite writing.

Nick, a recent graduate, has through his charm and Oxford connections, managed to create an arrangement where he lives very comfortably in the home of the rich and flamboyant Feddens. In return, he keeps a protective eye on the mentally ill (spoiled?) daughter and provides wit, snobbish knowledge and social lubrication at various events.

Gerald, the father in the Fedden household, is an ambitious (but lazy?) Tory MP, a businessman with some inherited wealth which is dwarfed by the wealth he married into. The extended family and social circle includes Lords, Ladies, Dukes and super-rich businesspeople of dubious integrity; all have a highly developed sense of greedy entitlement. It is the mid-1980s, Thatcher is at her prime, and everything is great for the Feddens and their associates who all adore the “Lady” (some of the older men in sexually inappropriate ways).

The genius of the book is that Nick by contrast is politically neutral and from a modest middle-class background. He is amongst “them” but in no way part of them. He is the perfect observer of the machinations of the politically and economically powerful in the British 1980s. To fully exploit Nick’s observational position the book is written in the 3rd person but from Nick’s point of view, so alongside his great dialogue, we are also privy to Nick’s wonderful unspoken sarcastic snobbish wit and observations.

The book has two subtle tensions running through it.

Firstly, despite the fact most people love him, Nick really is a freeloader. I could not help feeling he was always on the edge of being thrown out once he ceased to be useful or became a liability (or they simply noticed he was a freeloader not of their class).

Secondly, Nick is gay, promiscuous, and it is the 1980s. It really shouldn’t be a spoiler to say the spectre of AIDS becomes increasingly evident. It starts as a very gentle scratch with mere brief references to the health of secondary characters but grows in horror and edges closer to Nick.

The book concludes with how these twin tensions resolve themselves. The ultimate conclusion is very subtle (I re-read the last two pages several times and I am still not certain I know the conclusion). The plot is not the highlight feature, what made this book so engrossing to me was the “fly on the wall” observations Nick provides the reader with of the inner workings of an elite I knew existed but had no way in to see them at home. The palette of people Nick observes for us is wide, some are socially conservative while others are socially liberal (the Feddens embrace his sexuality while others display explicit homophobia), there is even a glimpse at a soft side of Thatcher (made with considerable literary licence) which does humanise a class of people I cannot like.

For me, this was a walk down memory lane. I was in my twenties at the time and a left-wing political activist with many gay friends, some of whom did not survive. To view my enemies as humans was a healthy perspective for me. Although I will always hate what they did, it is refreshing to see some of them were just lucky victims of their background in the same way others were unlucky victims of theirs; however some of them were, and remain, scum through and through.

Michele Brilli

MEGLIO LA THATCHER che la Brexit

Reviewed in Italy on June 8, 2017

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Il libro è scritto bene e descrive un periodo storico ( gli anni 80) dell'Inghilterra.La descrizioni dell'iniziazione sessuale omosessuale del protagonista è, nel contempo, cruda e superata dai tempi.
Per quanto riguarda la THATCHER mi pare invece che l'autore si sia proprio sbagliato: ha messo ordine e disciplina nella società e nell'economia inglese.

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Julle Bierling

A reflection of a turbulent time for the upper class gay world in London

Reviewed in Australia on April 11, 2022

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An informed yet incomplete portrait of one young man's brush with the politics and gay life of the eighties, the AIDS tsunami just on the horizon. What is missing is an honest appraisal of Nick' s appearance, vital in the gay world. Cleverness will gain you entry, but good looks, and sex appeal consolidate your position.

Tokyo Joe

Totally recommended

Reviewed in Japan on March 4, 2018

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Great book - rereading again. Totally recommended

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Denise

Oh that title, so misleading! :-)

Reviewed in Germany on November 17, 2015

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I saw a preview of the TV-Series and I just wanted to read the book. After I bought it I took it everywhere with me and one day I was taking the train and the conducter said to me: "The title of the book suits you" I was of course very flattered, but then I thought to myself smiling " If he had any idea, what this book was about, he wouldn't have said that!" A great portrait of that time and still an very intimate window into the struggles of the gay-community, not only back then, but also now!

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The Line Of Beauty Paperback – International Edition, January 1, 2004

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