Alan Hollinghurst

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.



Three of Hollinghurst's four novels are tragicomedies of manners in which a history is gradually made explicit for its reluctant, innocent or wilfully blind protagonist. In The Swimming-Pool Library Hollinghurst brings to light a buried history of gay London, from the Romans to the 1950s, its writers and musicians, from Shakespeare to Pope, Wilde to James, Forster and Brittan to Firbank. Like Firbank's flowers, the courage and the beauty of this history are often trampled underfoot; violence and racism darken the book and compromise the spoiled ease and the inheritance of its hero. But despite its sadness, The Swimming-Pool Library is the warmest of Hollinghurst's novels. The history it brings up from the darkness may be cruel, but the book's pivotal figure, the deceptively vacant old Lord Nantwich, is drawn with a tenderness and depth that Hollinghurst has not equalled since.

In Hollinghurst's next novel, The Folding Star, and in his subsequent work, the darkening shadow is less discovery and prison, but Aids and death. The Folding Star, about narcissism, a doomed search for love and the twilight world of symbolist art, ends with its hero looking out into the grey North sea past a picture of his lover Luc, whose baffling disappearance stands for the sudden extinction of too many lives and hopes. In The Line of Beauty Hollinghurst makes frequent teasing connections between sex and money and dares his audience to fall into the trap of linking Aids to the cash-soaked immoralities of the Thatcher age. But Aids is a killer beyond time; at the book's end, Nick Guest, its hero and scapegoat, sees himself already faded away, one of the innumerable, inevitable dead who love the world.

Even in The Spell, Hollinghurst's sunniest book, Aids is a penumbral presence, offsetting the couplings and uncouplings which drive the plot. Hollinghurst described The Spell to me as his favourite among his books; unlike the others it is less a morality tale, or an examination of beautiful flaws and flawed beauty, than an English pastoral. Its model is not just any old pastoral, but the most famous of all, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Spell's Athenians are metropolitan professionals, its Puck a cruel clubber, its flower-juice Ecstasy, its cloying roundelays techno and house. The book's ending is a pointed departure from Shakespeare's couples "ever true in loving" standing hand in hand: two gay couples bunched in a friendly line looking out to sea and a different sort of future.

Alan hollinghurst lives in a pastoral corner of town himself and as I walk up from the train, I am full of these literary allusions and questions I want to ask him, particularly about the reflections he has bounced off the mirrored surface of The Line of Beauty. Is Hollinghurst passing judgement on the decorative allures of the Lawson boom, drawing lines between it and the society that produced the rococo? When Nick Guest hides his cocaine behind a copy of Addison, is Hollinghurst making him a modern version of Mr Spectator, cruising London's streets, part of the show but apart from it too? And the name game; it is obvious that Hollinghurst loves playing it. Luc Altidore, the Villa Hermès, Robin Woodfield and now Nick Guest—it is all devilishly clever, and I know Hollinghurst enjoys such conundrums, having run an arcane literary quotations competition for years. I have brought my questions, or invitations, and I am hoping he will let me in on a few answers.

Ringing the bell I am belatedly dismayed at having proposed the interview. Such an encounter is set up to be a vampiric transfer of lifeblood, half-willed, half-resisted, from interviewee to interviewer. But despite demands from my gay friends—what is he wearing, which side does he dress, how is his flat?—it is not intimacies that I am after. It is more a wish for a novelist in his prime to fan out his cards for me, to give me a glimpse of the hand he is playing and a hint of his next move.

Hollinghurst looks owlishly through his glasses, his beautifully cut hair very white, his eyes very brown, and sits self-containedly in an armchair while we talk and drink coffee. There is no particular order to our conversation, though it lasts two hours, and as it goes on I realise that he is managing, with elegant politeness, to elude capture, though it is not really capture that I want, but illumination. We chat about the BBC production of The Line of Beauty, to be screened this winter. We talk about Ian McEwan's Saturday. He has not been able to get far through it. I say that Rushdie, necessarily, but Amis and McEwan too, seem willing to take on the mantle of elder statesmen, of public figures commenting on political events. Though Hollinghurst, at 51, is only a few years younger than them, his career seems at a completely different stage. He pauses, rather in the way that Lord Nantwich does in The Swimming Pool Library when there is something he doesn't want to reveal, then says that he has never wanted to be seen as a spokesman for his generation.

This seems a good opening for him to explain how he does see himself, or where he sees his work going. I ask him if he is trying to rewrite the traditional curve of the English realist novel, which for 250 years has followed the line of heterosexual romance; he replies firmly that that was what EM Forster was trying to do, bringing me up to a dead end. I ask my questions about The Line of Beauty and the rococo. Well, he says, he wasn't really thinking of economic connections between the Thatcher era and the 18th century; it was more about decoration. But yes, the rococo, it is as Catherine says, "just make-believe for rich people." So… I begin, but the question is gently abandoned. He says candidly that he dislikes research. We talk about dialogue, where much of his humour is concentrated. He says he thinks one should be able to convey a character's emotions in their speech, with just a "he said," or "she said"—no need for the heavinesses of, "he explained," "he acknowledged" and so on. I like this austerity, which is in keeping with the neatness of his person and surroundings, but later, checking through his books, I come to the conclusion that this is a new resolution. The early ones have plenty of "proposed," "asked," "prompted," and "confirmed."

We talk about his characters' names. He doesn't demur at all at my idea that William Beckwith is a kind of rhyme for William Beckford, or that the Feddens in The Line of Beauty should have been wary of anyone called Nick Guest. But he says Nick is the name of a good friend who died. As for others, he often finds them on the spines of books in his study.

I am reminded at this point of Will in The Swimming-Pool Library who suddenly thinks, "how mad the hetero world is," and wonder if Hollinghurst thinks the same of my questions. But if he does he doesn't show it. His deflections protect the integrity of his work. Hollinghurst can analyse, explain and dissect when he wants, as his extended pieces in the New York Review of Books always show. It is only, perhaps, that he doesn't want to be hostage to his own off-the-cuff remarks, or to have them break the spell of the work itself. I am sympathetic to this desire and to the feeling many novelists must have that faced with medusan journalists they have to protect themselves with a reflective shield. Perhaps that is particularly true in his case, because he is so obviously already a cult figure for his gay readers. His robust sex and club scenes are so accurate, one said to me, that you wondered how much they were drawn from his own experience.

Before lunch (he cooks a wonderful risotto without me really noticing) we talk about War and Peace, which Hollinghurst has just been reading and which he describes, with sudden confessional intensity, as "the greatest thing ever written." We pick out moments of brilliance. I mention the scene of old Prince Bolkonsky dying angrily, his fingers plucking at the bed coverings. Hollinghurst chooses the domestic scene at the end of the book when little Prince Nikolai (another Nick!) sits under the table, overhearing the grown-ups, anxiously breaking the pens and sticks of sealing wax. Whatever my choice shows, perhaps his says something about him, and about the way he sees the novelist as a hidden listener to the worlds of others.