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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Top reviews from other countries
Richard L.
Don't read the introduction, it's full of spoilers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2023
Julle Bierling
A reflection of a turbulent time for the upper class gay world in London
Reviewed in Australia on April 11, 2022
