Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, begins on the Central line and ends in the subterranean showers of an underground swimming pool.
His latest, The Line of Beauty, last year’s Booker prize-winner, starts on a hot summer day and ends with its protagonist and London bathed in “the light of the moment.” From the underground to the bright lights; Hollinghurst’s career has followed the same path. Although the main protagonists of all his novels have been young gay men, he has moved from a debut widely regarded as the best book about gay life written by an English writer to a novel which, strictly speaking, is not a “gay novel” at all, just a novel about the unravelling of a family that happens to have a gay man at its centre. The four novels, published over 16 years, make a brilliantly economical body of work, full of dreamily beautiful writing, teasing literary allusion, and a self-confidence encapsulated in the title of his Booker winner. The Line of Beauty is an obvious reference to the cocaine which spreads a beguiling charm over the story’s moral and financial subterfuges. It gestures knowingly to Hogarth’s treatise on the rococo, and introduces a series of parallels between the attractive surfaces of 18th-century England and Thatcher’s Britain. But as much as these it is a writer’s promise: every line in this book will be a beautiful one.
Hollinghurst started his published life as a poet (a good one, says a poet friend of mine), and is master of the gorgeous phrase, lightly, sometimes camply balanced, alive to language and rippling with humour. These phrases pile up almost to excess, like petals drifting off a cherry tree in spring. In sex scenes and scenes of humour, they add a gorgeous sheen to the explicit and the absurd that is both one of Hollinghurst’s hallmarks and one of the most enjoyable elements of his work.
If you are a subscriber, please log in »
This article is available to subscribers only
Subscribing to Prospect is the most reliable and convenient way to receive the magazine every month, and offers the best value.Subscription Types:
Online
An online subscription offers you complete and unlimited access to the entire website, including our searchable archive of every back issue of Prospect, and a PDF edition of each new issue: all this for just £20 per year. Purchase an online subscription »Renewal
Renew an existing subscription »Institutional access
If you are a library, business organisation or any other large institution that needs a multi-user licence, you can obtain institutional access.
Share
Subscribe to post comments
Print
