Alan Hollinghurst
The Line of Beauty
(Picador)

Leave your comments in the forum >>
Further Reading >>

Synopsis

In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolized at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions. As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to him as that of power and riches to his friends. Starting at the moment "The Swimming-Pool Library" ended, "The Line of Beauty" traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language.

Biography

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995.

His acclaimed first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of London gay life in the early 1980s through the story of a young aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich, whose life he saves. It was followed by The Folding Star in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). The narrator, Edward Manners, develops an obsessive passion for his pupil, a 17-year-old Flemish boy, in a story that was compared by many critics to Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice.
Spell (1998), a gay comedy of manners which interweaves the complex relationships between 40-something architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover Justin, and Justin's ex, timid civil servant Alex, who falls in love with Robin's son Danny. The action moves between the English countryside and London where Danny introduces Alex to ecstasy and the club scene.
Alan Hollinghurst's translation of Racine's play Bajazet was first performed in 1990. His most recent novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a decade of change and tragedy and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. It is currently being adapted for BBC Television by Andrew Davies.

Contributors Testimonials

Not many writers make me laugh out loud. I know only one who offers the additional pleasures of drugs and gay sex. In Alan Hollinghurst’s previous novel The Spell, it was ecstasy and gay sex. The Line of Beauty is set in the 1980s, so it’s cocaine and gay sex. And the writing is uncut pleasure, brilliantly immediate and fresh.
A gauche young man falls into a polymorphous (but not necessarily nice) crowd of politicos, playboys and poor boys, all united by that decade’s hunger to throw off the shackles of self-restraint. Thatcher’s in power – so why not? Hollinghurst unrolls a string of comic, and painfully true, set-pieces. A drunken twenty-first, so vividly conveyed it could give you a hangover; a toe-curling dinner with the family of an undeclared lover; the shock of first love - and first rejection. It may not be the last word on the 1980s – but it’s the best so far.

Neil Hunter