BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The Line Of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

  
 
DrNick
10:59 / 06.09.05
(ran search, found no mention of it)

I was curious as to just how good the book that beat Cloud Atlas to the Booker must be, so I gave The Line Of Beauty a go.

Did I miss something? What I read was a tedious – not too mention obvious – ramble through the 80s. I realise that everyone was meant to be vaguely hateful, but that doesn’t make the story any more readable, and I’ve read much more effective ‘weren’t the 80s mean’ tales. I’m just completely at a loss as to why this was considered book of the year. Yes, the writing is pretty good, there’s one or two good scenes and he’s very good at portraying the social tension, but even so.

Did anyone like it? Am I an ill-educated literary lout who can't appreciate a masterpiece when it's held up to my face?
 
 
OJ
14:26 / 06.09.05
I'm just after midway through this - so no spoilers please.

But I'm feeling quite disappointed so far. I really loved The Swimming Pool Library, which is also about rich, gay West London playboys in the 1980s and is sticky with hypocrisy and lust. I like it.

But I'm failing to see how Hollinghurst has moved on in the intervening x (15?) years. And the parallels are so similar as to make TLOB suffer in comparison - down to the fact that the protagonists tend to be toffs (or at least naturalised toffs), live in Holland Park and have the hots for young black men.

Hollinghurst is very readable, he has a great style, but it feels like a group of characters in search of a plot - with Thatcher looming over the whole thing, but not appearing, like the yuppie version of the madwoman in the attic.

The only thing is, I feel that I might be missing something because I don't know much about Henry James - perhaps the whole thing is in his style. But then Nick, who's supposedly doing a PHd on Jamesian style hasn't really expounded much on that subject (yet). So perhaps not.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
18:07 / 06.09.05
I thought it was well written, though not as well as were The Swimming Pool Library and The Folding Star. There were some potent images and, of course, the much quoted Dancing with Margaret after a Snort scene.

I think my problem was a failure to identify with anyone in the book. I just didn't really care about what happened to Nick or to anyone else. In fact I heartily disliked Nick, as one would, and spent the whole book wishing him ill. He can write people well, Hollinghurst, but there was a flashier, colder surface to this one.

And the sex wasn't all that. Maybe it causes more heatening of collar if you're less familiar with sleazy bum sex.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
03:57 / 07.09.05
I did quite like this. It arguably doesn't really get going until Nick starts his affair with


S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S



Wanni. Up until then, particularly in it's approach to the black lover issue (I remember thinking; fair enough and everything, but Alan, you've made your point,) it is a bit of a retread of The Swimming Pool Library. But after that personally it really took off, in terms of prose style, plotting (Nick's downfall I thought was pretty much perfectly done - Alan Hollinghurst seems to have been after a rewrite of Jane Austen here, the same sort of comedy of manners, except with blow jobs, coke, spanish waiters, Margaret Thatcher etc, I'm not sure if the sex scenes were ever really meant to be all that sexy, but either way, anyway, the denouement felt 'existentially' correct,) and the last few hundred pages were genuinely a pleasure to read. I couldn't say that about his other stuff. I suppose Hollinghurst has been a bit guilty of fetishising the idle-ish rich (for, I'd argue, fairly understandable reasons, the best revenge being to live well and so on, there are possibly parallels to be drawn with, I don't know, Snoop Doggy Dogg, etc, here,) but in The Line Of Beauty he does seem to be addressing that, in fact maybe a bit too much given the long black shadow that's hanging over Nick at the end. On the one hand as a character he hasn't really done anything, but on the other, he hasn't done anything all that bad. I liked, as well, the narrative approach to Wanni's crusading male nurse in the closing chapters - He's the kind of person Nick ought to have been thinking about becoming to an extent, but is nevertheless flagged up as a bit one-note, not nearly as much fun as his very ill charge. So you can sort of see Nick's point.

Basically, I'm guessing this got the Booker instead of Cloud Atlas because while The Line Of Beauty possibly maybe starts off quite badly it finishes well, whereas the opposite is true of Cloud Atlas, IMVHO.
 
 
DrNick
15:34 / 07.09.05
Yeah, that’s the thing – when I was reading it I was struck by the fact the Hollinghurst really knew how to turn a sentence, but it was my wholesale dislike of everyone in the book that put me off. Which kind of confuses me, as I’m not notmally prone to ‘requiring’ a sympathetic hero to empathise with, I’m usually quite at home with novels populated by fairly nasty pieces of work. I suppose it’s the fact that no-one was nasty enough, they weren’t really getting into their crappiness. I’m sure I could make a witty remark about the sheer banality of ‘genuine’ nasty pieces of work and how Hollinghurst has actually achieved a fantastic level of veracity, but I’m better at waffling than being witty so I won’t bother trying.
Never read any Henry James – can’t quite bring myself to read much pre-Modernist stuff, too boring on the whole. But I’m sure if I had I’d have been quietly chuckling to myself and thinking how droll it all was.
Re: Cloud Atlas – yeah, it gets a lot of stick for its ending. But I loved it, even for all its flaws. Maybe I’m just more inclined to like a book of vast ambition that doesn’t pull it off, than a well-turned out piece of ho-hummery (as I shall henceforth refer to Mr Hollinghurst’s book).
 
 
posthumous parvenues
09:03 / 17.06.07
It's a shame this thread is so short - 'Line' is, IMO, a great novel. The Jamesian aspect is fascinating - if you compare for intance Nick's surrealist dream sequence about the staircase to parts of James' short story 'The Jolly Corner' there are some intriguing things going on. In a way the whole of Line is a comment about the emtiness of 1980s aesthetics, from Wanni's kitsch office, Kessler's postmodern onslaught in his london building, and of course the status accumlulative attitude the Feddens have which Nick is so seduced by.

My reading of it is that Nick is corrupted by the world he chooses to inhabit. His UCL thesis (ostensibly about James, 'something about style', a vague entity that is never clear or possibly even completed) and constant parroting or bastardising of 'the Master' reveal a protaginist desperate to emulate a Jamesian, 1890s aesthete, with touches of other dandyish writers such as Wilde, Pater and Firbank. But Nick can never really do that, he is part of the culture of late capitalist stylization as much as the rest. His story follows the narrative, S-shaped arc of the ogee curve.

Hollinghust is dedicated to a tradition of gay writing, and by opting to set Line in the powerhouse world of this Tory MP, Notting Hill family I think offers a searing critique of the period (starting at the onset of Thatcher's second term, then jumping through in a triptych structure) - Nick tries to craft his own aesthetic, but can only disappear into a futile polemic based on Hogarth's ogee curve, ultimately ensconsed in the 'line' of coke than of beauty.

Also, as a young gay man in the 1980s, Nick's is a sort of coming out story which resists the familiar bildungsroman trope of a triumphant outcome, in favour of something darker and more complex. AIDS is represented too, obliquely somehow via the prejudices of the Feddens and all the toffs, the trauma of the crisis comes in through that - but not in a polemic or overstated way. Maurice Tipper! what an ARSE.

I think there is a sensitivity in this novel, a subtle humour and of course a 500p long elegy to Henry James even as Nick is reduced to paraphrasing bits and bobs of James to impress the younger men at the Ogee office, or, as he sits by the pool at the French chateau, to hide his erection on looking at Jasper with a copy of James' biography.

Any more thoughts?
 
 
matthew.
17:26 / 17.06.07
There's also this thread on the book in context of gay fiction and this thread on the film.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
17:47 / 17.06.07
I don't know nearly as much about Henry James as I should, I fear. Nor is the fact that so-and-so from the 'X-Files' (that hot redhead, who was in the HJ movie!) would arguably try to pretend that none of it had happened if we met, and I introduced myself, an issue. I'm okay about it. Well, I have to be now. The authorities have intervened.

What, all joking aside, I'd question is the idea of Hollinghurst as a 'gay' writer. I'm not sure if there's such a thing in the first place. Is EM Forster a 'gay' writer? Is William Burroughs? Isn't anyone who's any good's work concerned with broader issues than who their protagonist may or may not be sleeping with?

It strikes me that what's really innaresting about Hollinghurst's novels isn't so much the sexuality of the characters, as the relationship he seems to have with social priviledge - this is not a criticism, but he seems to be half in love with the idea of characters who swan about the place, indulging themselves, having fun. And that the moral, when it's finally delivered, is consequently something that he'd rather avoid.

On the one hand he's a (beginnning, middle, end, in the classic sense) good novelist, so his characters have to be punished, a bit, but on the other, there's no sense of the glee that, say, Martin Amis, seems to take in the demise of his creations.

He writes about it again and again, so wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Alan Hollinghurst, much like his friend Edward St Aubyn (also an innaresting writer) is actually a bit posh?

Not that this matters, at all, but mightn't Hollinghurt's work be as usefully analysed through some sort of class lens, as opposed to one that's anything to do with what he, personally, may or may not get up to when the lights are off?

Or something?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
19:26 / 17.06.07
He writes about it again and again, so wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Alan Hollinghurst, much like his friend Edward St Aubyn (also an innaresting writer) is actually a bit posh?

I despise myself a fair amount for posting the above - what Hollinghursts's life is really like is neither here nor there. I suppose what I was after is something to do with how his novels might fit into a decadent/romantic tradition (Wilde, Huysmans) and if so, why that might be? Hollinghurst's novels having more to do with straight-up social realism than either of the above's. What is it about the idly-monied that keeps him coming back to them, as a subject?
 
 
alas
17:22 / 24.06.07
I suppose what I was after is something to do with how his novels might fit into a decadent/romantic tradition (Wilde, Huysmans) and if so, why that might be? Hollinghurst's novels having more to do with straight-up social realism than either of the above's. What is it about the idly-monied that keeps him coming back to them, as a subject?

The idly-monied are the subject of many great writers to whom he's been compared, including James, of course--many of his characters develop their particular problems, the problems that define their lives when they inherit or otherwise acquire enough money to make them wealthy enough not to have to struggle--e.g., Isabel Archer. More directly, F. Scot Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby whose famous unreliable narrator is also named Nick, and is a guest living temporarily on the margins of the lives of the beautiful wealthy harmful people--Nick Caraway.

I've just been listening on tape to Brideshead Revisited where Charles Ryder develops a similar kind of relationship to the titled family living in Brideshead, but has a more reciprocal romantic relationship with Sebastian Flyte and ultimately an affair with SF's sister (primarily because she looks so much like Sebastian). And, just found this review of Line by James Wood who begins to flesh out some of the comparisons that were rattling in my brane..., saying

Though Hollinghurst's prose has about it an air of Jamesian moral intelligence, one has the uneasy feeling that Hollinghurst is more in love with his gilded world than he can always acknowledge. The novel sometimes surrenders to a kind of yearning, not unlike Waugh's in Brideshead Revisited, the yearning that the middle- or even upper-class writer may sometimes feel for thoughtless, graceful aristocracy.

That seems about right to me--and it's something that I am embarrassed to admit I have a very hard time avoiding in myself, when I'm honest with myself...damn it.
 
  
Add Your Reply