Many thanks to everyone who read the introduction to this blog which I posted on Sunday. Now for the first book. I already have a bit of a backlog going back to November, when the move to Manchester took place, but have decided to try and clear it so as to have as complete a record as possible.
I first read Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty in July 2005 (as the inscription on the first page of my paperback copy usefully informs me). It had won the Booker Prize the previous year, a fact which makes Hollinghurst's most recent novel's non-appearance on even the long list for the same prize in 2011 even more extraordinary. I had always meant to re-read it, and brought it to Manchester for that purpose. The publication of The Stranger's Child last year brought Hollingshurst back to my attention, along with the fact that we are once more under a Tory government (okay, it's a coalition, but with the Tories more dominant than the frantic negotiations of May 2010 might have led some of us, naively perhaps, to hope would be the case). The Line of Beauty documents the Thatcher years, unfolding in successive episodes from 1983, 1986 and 1987. The main character is Nick Guest, a young gay man just out of university who becomes a lodger in the home of Gerald Fedden, a Tory MP riding the tide of his relentlessly reforming government and in particular his own thrilling rise through its ranks. Nick basks in the reflected glory which his unlikely niche in the Fedden household has given him, dreaming of one day meeting the PM herself, while toying with his PhD on Hogarth, cherishing his unrequited passion for Gerald's son Toby and trying to prevent his daughter Catherine from killing herself. Catherine's depression is, as the novel opens, the only dark note: all is gilded and sunny in Nick's world as he re-crafts himself into a skilled negotiator of a social world that had seemed beyond his reach. As the London summer of 1983 wears on, Nick finds a boyfriend in the person of Leo, a young, black guy of a distinctly lower social class than the one in which Nick is now moving, with whom he becomes infatuated. This affair is, however, only a prelude to a much more serious relationship to follow, whose consequences explode the safe, self-congratulatory world of the early 80s.
I really enjoyed The Line of Beauty when I first read it, but I had forgotten quite how well written it is - the prose is a joy in itself, each sentence crafted with the care of a writer who publishes rarely and discards, I suspect, much. It's also extremely funny in a subtle, wry kind of a way: the episode in which Gerald participates in a "welly-wanging" contest at his local constituency fete had stayed in my memory as a perfect example of the humour to be drawn from the kind of man for whom anything, however trivial, becomes a matter for fierce competition. Hollinghurst can also write a better party than anyone else: there are a few wonderful set-pieces in this novel. It also seemed to me a more serious novel than it did in 2005, perhaps because of the financial crisis and change of government which have occurred in the meantime; a portrait of a set of people who claim the status of masters of the universe as a kind of divine right, for whom money simply "turns itself" into more money, and who, of course, are hiding all kinds of dark secrets.
By chance, while I was re-reading the novel, Alan Hollinghurst came to give a reading in Manchester which clashed for me with a pre-existing commitment. I didn't know whether to be encouraged or dismayed that this represented the first events clash of my new life. Gregory went for both of us, and returned with a signed copy of The Stranger's Child which he gave me for Christmas. This obviously posed a dilemma for the purposes of this blog; nonetheless I read it immediately, but won't review it in detail here since it was not among the books that I already owned when we moved. Suffice it to say that I hugely enjoyed it and devoured it in about a week: the Forsterian atmosphere of the opening section is intoxicating and the first two-thirds of it are wonderful. The returns are diminishing towards the end - how often is that true? - but I highly recommend it.
PS: I should perhaps clarify a point in the previous post about the French wine merchant. We did not buy job lots of wine from her, but took advantage of her back room full of empty boxes when we moved. The neighbours must have thought that we were alcoholics with an insatiable appetite for co-operatively produced chick peas: the remaining boxes were sourced from the health food shop over the road.
Sounds great. Almost have hopes, from your critique, from the "welly-wanging", from the skill in craft and set-pieces, that the author will give me the kind of pleasure I get from reading Evelyn Waugh. No pressure then, Emma... :-)
ReplyDeleteSo have just borrowed the book from the library, after returning another Booker winner, Julian Barnes' 'The Sense of an Ending'. I enjoyed the Barnes book but it seemed small, and not just in size: few characters and few situations and few locations, none realised enough to become (at least to this reader) characters wih depth, situations with complexity, places that the mind visualises. There is much thinking by the narrator, and everything in the book is tied almost exclusively to the ramifications of unreliable memory, which is highly interesting as a theme, of course - but perhaps a tad limited when excised from deeper, containing nests of human behaviour and story-telling.
The Line of Beauty sounds so much larger and fuller and more ambitious. First few pages look promising to me - will read the book and then re-read your appreciation. Thanks for the recommendation.
Thanks Mike - am thrilled by your swift action in getting this book out of the library! I've also read The Sense of an Ending - G gave it to me for Christmas, but, as with The Stranger's Child, I didn't think it qualified for inclusion in this blog. Since you mention it, though, I will say that I found it very disappointing. It finally convinced me that winning the Booker Prize does not necessarily mean anything - so much depends on who is on the judging panel in any given year and what their particular tastes and/or prejudices may be, and, most pertinent in this case, whether they feel it really is time X won, despite the book in question being a bad example of his or her particular talent. I found Barnes's novel very slight - not because of its length, but because of the failures of characterisation that you mention. I was unsure throughout why on earth I should care about any of these people. It was tinged with an unpleasant whiff of sexism, too - Veronica's refusal to have sex with the protagonist had become, by the end, evidence of her mental instability - and I got fed up of having the unreliability of the narrator continually thrust in my face. Yes, I wanted to shout by the end of a few chapters, I've got it! He's an unreliable narrator! Very clever! Now can you leave the dissertations on how things aren't always how we remember them, and warnings to take the narrative with a pinch of salt, and so on and on and on. As Craig Raine, one of my university tutors, used to write on our essays, "thin. Very thin."
ReplyDeleteWill comment more on both books when I've finished the Hollinghurst book, but I'm a long way in now - Gerald whanged the welly at about 1a.m. last night, and he whanged it well - and it reads pretty damn good to me. Fat. Very Fat.
ReplyDeleteMy partner keen for me to finish asap so that she can read it herself for all the frenzied male sex objectification (is that a word? If it is, it shouldn't be) that I've alerted her too.
Thanks again for the tip on this book, Emma - it's really good, very impressive. Much better than the Barnes, I can only echo your opinions on that. Here's my take on The Line of Beauty!
ReplyDeleteA page turner about old money and new during the Thatcher years. As Emma says, beautifully written -- the pages turning not so much because of dense plotting or continual narrative tension, but by the ease of characterisation, the flow of conversation and detail, the abrupt developments that suddenly connect private preoccupations to other people's fates and to public life.
With the dialogue in particular the author shows a great deal of human insight (and technical writerly skill) - the words saying one thing, the speaker's behaviour or intentions saying something slightly different, the reception of the words saying something slightly different again. I have a feeling that a re-reading of this novel would be richly rewarding for me.
I was, as I'd hoped, reminded of Evelyn Waugh in places, but even more so I was reminded of Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, and I've just googled around a bit and found that this is not an original insight. There are many connections. The central characters of The Line of Beauty and DMT are rather chameleon-like, demonstrating their environments without really asserting who they are; most of the other characters, if not all, are cynical and compromised by wealth or power or privilege (the portrait of high society is very bleak indeed, no one seems to say or do anything sincerely); minor characters keep cropping up like bad smells, which is always fun.
Nick, the social climbing middle-class gay narrator, starts off as an underconfident virgin. He penetrates, as it were, more and more deeply into a family who exemplify power, wealth, privilege, charm, hypocrisy and secrets - but who has fucked whom, is the question that develops by the end, when scandal breaks over all of them. And you could argue that Nick's own private urges, unleashed in parallel to those of the body politic and moving beyond healthy sexual adventure to a bleak greed, is the mirror in the attic of the family, their set, its Thatcherite justification, that he aspires to be part of. Everyone corrupts one another, directly or indirectly, merely by participating in the mutual privilege of their set.
Gerald, the Tory MP whose aspirations and fate this story is cast around, is a fantastic creation. I wish he weren't accurate but I fear he may well be.
I did find the amount of cocaine-fuelled sex scenes too many -- to the point of becoming boring -- in the middle of the book. The first couple of sex scenes are wonderful, I've never read a writer who can portray the psychology of male desire as accurately as that before, it's absolutely forensically accurate and absorbing; but then it gets out of hand. In fiction, unlike in life, excess isn't accurately conveyed by quantity. For example, in Jane Austen's Emma, Miss Bates is an excessively boring conversationalist, and my recollection is that Austen shows her being boring, at length, on one occasion. From that point on, the boredom is known, and need only be signalled lightly to generate the effect. If Miss Bates was very boring at length on every occasion that Miss Bates appears, then the reader would be, well, bored. And I got very bored at times in The Line of Beauty reading about yet another line of coke, yet another casual pick up. On a similar theme, the social setting of this story is 99% upper class, and every character is, in one way or another, ghastly - the absence of social range becomes pretty draining at times.
But these are minor quibbles -- what great novel can escape them?! A fantastic recommendation, Emma -- thanks!