|
Literary Review
FICTION
Luminous prose
|
`Hollinghurst's prose is dense, textured, full of delicately nuanced details.'
|
ALAN HOLLINGHURST'S fourth novel, the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, begins in 1983, which was also the setting of his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988). The Line of Beauty is the story of a young man's coming of age in the heady political world of 1980s Britain. Nicholas Guest is just out of Oxford and working on a thesis on style in the work of that other Master, Henry James. Nick is literally a kind of guest in this glittering world: he has been invited to lodge with the family of Gerald Fedden, Conservative MP from Barwick and father of Nick's friend Toby, in their spacious Notting Hill residence.
A time of innocence
When the novel opens, with the landslide election victory of that year, the Feddens are vacationing in France; it is a glorious, pre-AIDS summer; and Nick has fixed up a blind date for the evening with a man called Leo ("Black guy, late 20s, v. good-looking, interests cinema, music, politics, seeks intelligent like-minded guy 18-40"). Nick, 20, intelligent, with a first from Oxford, finds the "tolerant age range comforting", and wonders if this, his first time, means that it will be the beginning of a 20-year relationship. It isn't, as the following sections of the novel will show us: for the seasons come and go, and the moments of happiness become more fleeting and far between with the passing of time; and his black civil servant boyfriend, as well as other lovers along the way, are destined for tragedy. There are also other falls from grace in store for other players in the political drama. But all that is in the future: in this first and fabulous summer, Nick is dizzyingly in love — with his boyfriend, with the Feddens' privileged life, with the giddy times, and with love itself. It is a time of shining, unsuspecting innocence.
It is in the course of Nick's involvement with the beautiful, fabulously rich supermarket heir Wani Ouradi that the title motif appears in the form of the "Ogee", the effete enterprise funded by Wani as a pastime for Nick, and named after the S-shaped double curve, the "line of beauty" of William Hogarth. And in a year that — with novels by Colm Toibin and David Lodge, has been filled with the spirit of Henry James — the spirit of the Master also pervades this narrative, even at a party, in the course of small talk:
`Was it Henry James you're working on?'
`Er...yes,' said Nick.
She seemed to settle comfortably on that, but only said, `My father's got tons of Henry James. I think he calls him the Master.'
`Some of us do,' said Nick. He blinked with the exalted humility of a devotee and sawed off a square of brown meat.
`Art makes life: wasn't that his motto? My father often quotes that.'
`It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process,' said Nick.
`Something like that,' said Penny. She smiled contentedly into the candlelight. `What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?' she went on.
`Well...' Nick chewed it over... `He'd have been very kind to us, he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us.'
Delicately detailed
The novel is divided into three sections: "The Love-Chord (1983)"; "To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong?" (1986); and "The End of the Street (1987)", and a different mood suffuses each section: innocence in the first, passion in the middle period, and sadness, inevitably, in the final pages. Hollinghurst's prose is exquisitely crafted, even luminous in parts as it describes the rush and pangs of first love; it is also wickedly funny as it describes Gerald's reverential attitude towards "the Lady", the Prime Minister who, at the height of Gerald's success, arrives at the Feddens' anniversary party. And here we are treated to a brilliant sketch of Thatcher, from the "well-known voice", the "gracious scuttle", like "modern royalty", to the long black skirt and "amazingly embroidered" white-and-gold jacket; and finally "the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck". Resonances of Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), Anthony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) have been identified in the novel: but where Hollinghurst's novel is lifted out of the realm of social satire and into the realm of timeless art is in the final, elegiac part of the narrative, at a point in time that is not only the end of the road, and the end of a whole way of life — but also, literally, the end of life itself for many of the people within these pages who, with their colour and desire, have brought the story alive for us. Hollinghurst's prose is dense, textured, full of delicately nuanced details: lines filled with irony, insight, and beauty.
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, p.501, £3.50.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
