‘The Line of Beauty’, English writer Alan Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, and the 2004 Man Booker winner, stands as a sort of sequel to his first: ‘The Swimming Pool Library’. That was an explication and celebration of a sub-culture, male homosexuality, then still illegal, although winkingly acknowledged as an abiding part of British literary and theatrical tradition. In ‘Swimming Pool’, set in the early ‘80s, despite proscriptions, the London community is proud and out and the party is on; in ‘The Line’, set mostly in the mid ‘80s, the party is still on, but courtesy of AIDS, winding to a grim close.
Specifically, ‘The Line of Beauty’ is set between two national elections, both victories for the Conservatives, and particularly their leader, Margaret Thatcher. This was her high time. Our protagonist and chronicler—everything is seen through his eyes—is Nick Guest, fresh from Oxford with a First, embarking on a Henry James P.H.D. Nick is renting, provisionally, an attic room of a grand London house in Notting Hill owned by the parents of a Uni friend (and unrequited love object), Toby Fedden, whose father, Gerald, is one of Thatcher’s MPs and acolytes.
Setting up Hollingworth’s first subject: a forensic exploration of ‘80s Britain dealing, for the most part, with the aristocracy and their intersection with/role as the ruling class, elected and otherwise. The focus is still on London, but we also visit an ancestral spread and a provincial town, Nick’s birthplace. So there is some range, but Hollinghurst is basically fixated on the city aristos, and his knowledgeable exposé of their lifestyles recalls Evelyn Waugh, where, as here, satire and critique are occasionally underpinned by envy and even malice.
Nick (the) Guest is well set up. His vague ‘duty’, as subsidised renter, and ill-defined family member, is to ‘look after’ the bi-polar younger sister, Catherine. A duty he manages fairly well until she runs off the rails towards the end. Meanwhile, he pursues his own agendas, hidden to the household.
Hollinghurst structures the book in three separate time periods: 1983,1986 and 1987. These periods each contain a sequence of set pieces, advancing the drama like acts in a play. They are all brilliantly realised, the observation of character and setting impressively accomplished in detail and perception. Hence the Booker. The abruptly shifting blocks give an impression of life lived on an accelerant which in this case is Nick’s, whose evolving experiences are Hollingworth’s second and main subject. Nick’s ‘doings’, combining with that of the aristos, swells the narrative to its two climaxes.
Initially Nick, bright, keen, inexperienced, drawn to a world of glamour, power and privilege, is collegiate with those romantic blades of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and all who followed in their wake. Poor, but with energy, charm and sexual charisma, climbing the greasy pole to the top. Save for one crucial factor here: Nick is gay. If you are not born into this world, to accede to it you must work a way to marry into it and this is not really possible for Nick. In short order he sees that what he wants here he can never attain, and this skews him into another direction.
In the gap between 1983 and 1986, there are unexplained changes in Nick’s character. Our endearing love-struck ingenue, just as the Lines of Beauty have somehow transformed into lines of cocaine, himself has somehow transformed into a sycophantic parasite, a cynical exploiter and even, at times, a kind of sexual predator and pimp. The sex that was once genuinely affectionate is now coldly transactional and wincingly sordid. What has happened here? For me, it can only be understood as someone, by acting, discovering their own nature. To use an extreme comparison, Macbeth is persuaded by his wife to commit a murder, thus finding out that he is a natural killer. Nick apparently turns into himself, and the result is not pretty. This is fully brought home in the novel’s first climax.
It is Nick’s hosts, Gerald and Rachel’s, twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and for the big bash, Gerald has triumphantly scored his idol, Maggie Thatcher. Hollinghurst’s dramatization of this party is a tour de force. We see the PM, like Elizabeth l, surrounded by all her fawning and scheming courtiers. So many horrible right-wing bogeymen, a few too many, but who knows, maybe it is as he tells it. Anyway, at some point, while all these upper-crust nasties are carrying on downstairs, Nick, upstairs, is also carrying on a threesome with one of the distinguished guests (his present lover and provider) and a waiter and the obligatory cocaine. The literary intention here is savagely satirical, blackly humorous, the wild contrast, the dark underbelly etc. but all I could think of was what an idiotic ingrate Nick has become.
The big night for his hosts, who invited him into their house to share their lives, treated him with respect and affection, whose son is one of his Oxford heroes and buddies. If Nick must indulge himself like this, can’t he do it elsewhere? Because of Thatcher, the house is packed with policeman. At any point, the drug-fuelled threesome might be revealed, which would destroy Gerald’s career and damage the lives of the family. At this point I lost any regard I still might have held for Nick, quite the opposite, and subsequently the novel hollowed out for me.
For consider, if the book, in its essence, turns out to have no moral referent, which one took to be Nick, then what is its purpose? What is all this brilliantly sustained societal satire being contrasted against?
Inevitably, with all the upstairs/downstairs seediness, the house of cards comes spectacularly tumbling down in the second climax and denouement. But really there is no high tragedy here, just a bunch of unpleasant people getting their various come-uppances. Which also, incidentally, partly devalues the real tragedy of AIDS.
The vacuous and unlamented inhabitants of ‘The Line of Beauty’ (we’ll except the wife, Rachel and son Toby), are finally seen skittering off to their individual dooms but by now, despite all Hollinghurst’s virtuosic literary skills, we really don’t give a damn. It’s pretty much good riddance and let’s move on.