Frustrated by his first brush with romance, Nick Guest feels he’s been “swept to the brink of some new promise,” and the moment is profoundly poignant. Though “The Line of Beauty” runs through a period scarcely more than thirty years in the past, time already seems to have rendered Margaret Thatcher’s England as misty and distant as something out of “Brideshead Revisited.” Could the world really have changed this much so quickly? That misty quality is deceptive. In this penetrating and mature work, Alan Hollinghurst employs a hard, sharp wit to delineate the sort of moral bankruptcy that attended the early days of the HIV pandemic. As in Hollinghurst’s “The Swimming Pool Library,” the contrast between the rather savage tale and his complex and contemplative style proves riveting.

At Oxford, the youthful main character obsesses over a friend from a wealthy background. Visiting their home, Nick finds himself seduced by the pleasures of wealth and yearns to “steep himself in the difficult romance of the family.” Someone should have warned him to be careful what he wished for. He becomes a chronic houseguest, and his initiation into the world of erotic love (for which he’s “achingly ready and completely unprepared”) is concomitant with his passage into a realm of privilege and prejudice. As in all his work, the author adroitly steers the tone through personal drama to scathing social satire. Along the way, he veers into a veritable tour of British literary icons from Austin to Waugh – with an especially satisfying journey through the heart of Henry James territory – without ever diminishing the impact of his own remarkable voice. ( )

The main character of this book is Nick Guest, a middle-class Oxford scholar hanging about the world of a very well-to-do, conservative political family in mid-eighties London, an aesthete obsessed with the idea of beauty, an admirer of beautiful boys and art and architecture and the writing of Henry James. The prose of the book itself is so beautiful that I stopped forty pages in and reread them just to savor the elegance of the language. It's the kind of book that makes me feel compelled to commit passages to memory. As a story, I found The Line of Beauty thought-provoking and filled with rich detail. It is enjoyable on so many levels, from the political to the personal, satirical to tragic. The characters are memorable and linger in my mind in all their flawed and endearing complexity. I enjoyed this book immensely! ( )

In The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest is a young, coke-snorting gay man from modest means, who, in early 1983, is invited to stay with the wealthy and well-bred Fedden family. Gerald Fedden is a Tory MP, an empty man who has mastered the art of superficial charm that comes with his station. Nick, already an outsider by his gay status in this Thatcherite era, falls in love with the Fedden family and their lifestyle, eventually choosing a lover who can supply him with the finer things in life. Nick is our travel guide through this world of detached privilege, while the realities of the outer world, including AIDS, threatens to disrupt it all. Alan Hollinghurst's impeccable prose and perfect rendering of this era in recent London history has won The Line of Beauty wide acclaim.

Pure pleasure and very reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway: the townhouse in the heart of power, the magnificent bourgeois matron, the contrast between her and people who are in one way or another falling apart, the conclusion of everyday joy as the justification for living.

It's fascinating to see how much readers disagree about this book: the range of opinions on offer here — from "boring" to "brilliant" — demonstrates the strength of the LT reviewing system when applied to recent, bestselling books; the difficulty of deciding which opinion to trust shows the limitations of user reviews. Obviously, a lot of people decided to read this book because it had won a major literary prize, and some of those were readers who wouldn't normally be tempted to try Hollinghurst, and had trouble with the upper-middle-class English setting, the "high" literary style or the (rather minimal) descriptions of gay sex. That probably accounts for most of the "boring" or "disgusted" reviews, but it still leaves a biggish range of opinion from people who did approach it seriously and on its own terms. And I would agree that it is a difficult book to make your mind up about. There are a lot of different threads being developed in the book, and it's hard to work out which of them are really important.

I think it would be a mistake to see this as primarily a political novel. The venality of Tory ministers, the grasping nature of business in the eighties, AIDS, homophobia: these themes are all present in the book, but they've been chewed over ad nauseam by other writers already, and Hollinghurst isn't pretending to say anything new about them. We shouldn't forget that he is writing in 2004 with twenty years of hindsight, and that he's already been there and done that with The Swimming-pool Library (1988). He's clearly picked the eighties because the period is one he knows about, and because he believes he can apply that experience to give the reader some more general insights. Similarly, making the main viewpoint character gay is something that shouldn't have to be seen as a "political" choice any more: it is simply one of the available options, and the one that should come most naturally to an author who happens to be gay himself.

It is, obviously, a very literary project. The plot device of having a central character of modest origins and impeccable aesthetic sensibilities taken up by a wealthy and powerful family obviously resonates with things like Brideshead revisited, The great Gatsby (Nick Carraway!) and A dance to the music of time (Nick Jenkins!!) as well as with the book that is explicitly discussed in the text, Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton (Fleda, not Nick). The measured, half-ironic style is reminiscent of James, Powell, or Forster, and the wealth of minor characters is very Powell-ish. Hollinghurst is clearly just as comfortable writing within this tradition as we are reading in it, and there is perhaps an important point to be made about the way in which the tradition can accommodate insider trading, coke-snorting and the Iron Lady just as well as it was able to cope with the horrors of fascism, Stalinism and two world wars.

The title suggests that what Hollinghurst finds most important in the book might be the debate about aesthetics implied by the recurrent image of Hogarth's "line of beauty". Obviously, the choice of Hogarth is interesting, as someone who combined social and political satire with theorising about the nature of beauty, just as Hollinghurst seems to be doing here. The actual shape of the line of beauty doesn't seem to be as important here as the exploration that takes place in the novel of the relationships between power, money, sex and beauty. Nick is notionally employed by Wani as an "aesthetician", i.e. as someone who appreciates beauty on behalf of his employer, just as Nick's father, an antique dealer, converts money into beauty and back again for his aristocratic clients. Gerald is stuck in a destructive vicious circle, in which power begets money and money power. He has poor taste (he likes the music of Richard Strauss), but his money has also bought him beauty, in the shape of marriage to Rachel and access to the aesthetic sensibility of the Kessler family. And of course, in the end the people with the power and the money survive, whilst those who only bring beauty into the equation (like Nick's father, and Nick's early lover Leo) are the ones who suffer. Beauty is desirable, but it is not essential, and in the Thatcherite ideal it is power itself that is beautiful (Gerald is always going on about the Prime Minister's blue eyes).

I'm not sure how far all that takes us, but it is interesting and thought-provoking up to a point. A bit more difficult is the difficulty we face in identifying with Nick, upon whom the author seems to have wished all the unattractive features of (his own??) youth. He is self-centred, pompous, snobbish, and far too self-assured in his artistic judgments. The sort of person of which there was no shortage at Oxford in the early eighties, perhaps, but not necessarily someone one would wish to spend an entire book with. Possibly we were all a bit like that in our twenties, but it's pleasanter not to be reminded of it... ( )