This is by Alan Hollinghurst. It was published in 2004, and won the Booker Prize the same year.

Even respectable news outlets ran with titles like "Gay novel wins Booker Prize"...

True, it was apparently the first Booker winner to foreground the gay community. But this is so much more than a "gay novel". Set in the 1980s, it's a novel about self-discovery, class differences, Thatcher's Britain, contemptible politicians, endemic racism -- and, yes, also about homophobia, and the Aids epidemic that was casting a black shadow over lives in that period.

I read The Lessons, by Naomi Alderman, in August. Listed by critics among its antecedents, along with Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History, was The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst's novel is not set at a university, but our protagonist, Nick Guest, came to be living in the London house of the Feddens, a posh British family, because he'd got to know the son, Toby Fedden, at Oxford. Toby is resolutely straight, but Nick never quite gave up hoping. And the next best thing to a relationship was to be the lodger. So he takes up residence in their glitzy place in Kensington Park Gardens, and pays rent that they pocket as though it's pin-money.

The Fedden milieu is glitteringly useful to this self-proclaimed aesthete, who has outgrown the environment of his parents' small-town antique business, and is now happily sucking up all the experiences offered by the capital while researching for a PhD on Henry James. The Feddens (Gerald, a Conservative MP, who I swear I couldn't read about without thinking of Boris Johnson, and Rachel, his wife, well-heeled and long-suffering -- or is it just thick-skinned?) give Nick an entree into all kinds of interesting social and economic opportunities.

And he, in turn, makes himself useful to them, admittedly in a dogsbody kind of way. He makes up numbers at dinner parties when necessary, runs errands, and keeps an eye on Catherine, the bipolar Fedden daughter. His is the curious position where they act as though he's part of the family, while very much making sure he stays in his box. At the Feddens' wedding anniversary party, which Gerald turns into an opportunity to host Prime Minister Thatcher, we're told: "[Nick] was pressed against the banister at the first turn of the stair, smiling down like an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting." Sums it up beautifully...



So, yes, part of the novel is focused on a young man finding his feet in the gay scene in London, dating first Leo Charles, a working-class man of West Indian descent, who has not yet come out to his religiously conservative mother; and then Antoine (Wani) Ouradi, the gorgeous but still closeted son of a bumptious tycoon (who is way too self-absorbed and unimaginative to penetrate the hetero front carefully maintained by Wani, his mother, and his pseudo-fiancee). Our focus is young men, and according to Sebastian Faulks's introduction, The Line of Beauty was part of a new, 1980s wave of novels, which differed from "their wistful and restrained predecessors", and aimed to "document the gay experience". So there's plenty of casual sex, and some of it seems pretty exploitative.

But Hollinghurst also splits open for us the sordid world of Thatcher-era finance and politics. The rich are entitled, narrow-minded, and obnoxious (arguably to a degree that's caricature-like). Wani's father notes that Thatcher ("the lady") is a friend of his. He tells Nick that while she is "a great figure of the age", she's also very kind: "He had the mawkish look of a brute who praises the kindness of another brute." The Tippers (Sir Maurice and Sally) are likewise insufferably brash and boorish.

And Gerald...? Well, he's particularly loathsome... He's the MP who despises his constituents, and trades on a "special mixture of laziness and ambition". He's the family man who thinks nothing of usurping a private occasion for political gain, or starting a clandestine relationship with his assistant, or swamping the wall of family photos in the kitchen with pictures of his meetings with the famous. He's the self-satisfied self-server who has perfected a "frowning moping manner of comprehending the feelings of others while being quite untouched and even lightly repelled by them"; he's the hypocrite who conveys "solemn sympathy" with a "heavy-faced look, indeed like someone resisting a laugh".

At the end of the book, when his sleazy business dealings have derailed his political career (only temporarily, we're sure), and Wani's coke-fuelled involvement with Nick has created a gigantic scandal, we have this: "[Gerald] was wearing cavalry twill trousers and a buff crew-neck sweater. The effect was of symbolic abasement mixed with military resolve -- the strategy for a comeback must already be in hand."

THIS, by the way, not this, is the way to do clothes... The outfit conveys so much...

This paragraph continues: "Nick had a silly sense of privilege in seeing him in private and in trouble; and at the same time, which was more of a shock, he felt almost oppressively bored by him. Gerald gazed into the garden, but really into his own sense of grievance."

He doesn't have to garden-gaze for long. Soon after his resignation, he's offered a directorship that will bring in GBP 80,000 a year... As Penny, his assistant/lover, says: "That’s how this world works, Nick. Gerald can’t lose. You’ve got to understand that."


London, 2023

***

Opinion seems to vary about the character of Nick. For sure, he's shallow. At one point we're told: "Nick dropped onto the sofa beside Catherine, lounged with one leg curled under him and a grin on his face at his own elegance. He felt he could act himself all night." He's also prone to skirting the truth, and ducking responsibility. Even without the lurking scourge of Aids, we can see that his drug habit and his love of bling are quickly taking him down dangerous paths. Wani provides for him in a way that's close to humiliating -- a natty little car, a pad for crashing in, a kind-of-job that also functions as a cover for their relationship. It's hard to imagine how this wouldn't go wrong...

Nevertheless, I like him. At least, I like him on the page. I'm not sure how I'd cope with him in real life. But he's hungry for experience, and what's wrong with that? As Faulks says in his Introduction, "There is no real harm in him; there is only a semi-naive enthusiasm for the world and its passing sensations."

And I can't help feeling for anyone who -- try as he might -- can never quite manage to breach that impermeable membrane that seals off the British upper classes from the minions below them. Whatever you do, you can never really belong, and that's underlined time and again in this novel. He loves living with the Feddens, but he's not entirely comfortable: He experiences "a sense close to panic that he didn't belong in this house with these people".

When he's finally invited to stay with the family at the "manoir" in France that's owned by Lord Kessler, Rachel's brother, we're given this wonderfully expressive musing: "'It’s fabulous to be here,' said Nick, with just a shiver, as they turned in between urn-crowned gate-piers, of the old feeling, from the first day at Oxford, the first morning at Kensington Park Gardens, of innocence and longing... [Toby] seemed to tread there for a moment, framed and silhouetted, as he had at the Worcester lodge, all those years ago, in the archway that led from the outside world to the inner garden: Toby, who was born to use the gateway, the loggia, the stairs without looking at them or thinking about them."

And Nick does have the knack of finding beauty... The clandestine relationship with Wani might be seen as sordid and degrading -- and yet "he saw a beauty in the slyness of it". The beauty of Oxford has embedded itself in his soul: "Nick remembered an evening in Oxford, drifting out through the Meadows to the Isis, and along by the boathouses, the eights all in and stowed, but one or two rowers still about, as if held by the late light, the mood of freedom and discipline by the river."

At the end, when Wani is already very sick, Nick takes delivery of the first issue of the magazine they have been working on. It's called Ogee, after the curve -- the line of beauty -- that William Hogarth found so captivating. The project was in large part a pretext, a front, but the result is exquisite. The guy who delivers it knows nothing about these things, but spontaneously exclaims that it's "fucking beautiful". Nick has an article about the famous line, "illustrated with sumptuous photos of brooches, mirrors, lakes, the legs of rococo saints and sofas".

But leafing through the pages is a supremely melancholy experience. The magazine has "the gleam of something that was over... It was the only Ogee. Lying there, in a room in his house, at noon on a mild autumn day, it might have been Wani's memorial tablet, with the angel's wing sheltering the blank where his name and achievements should go."



***

Bit by bit, Aids has crept up on us in The Line of Beauty. We start to hear of peripheral people dying, but nothing is made explicit at first. Then we learn that Leo has died. By the end, Wani is dying. (These facts, as John Mullan points out, are elegantly conveyed by means of ellipsis. The book is divided into three sections, with three years between the first two, and a year between the second two. A lot can happen in such intervals. When Nick is told about Leo's death, he takes us on a flashback to the last time he saw him. He already looked gaunt and skinny and way older than his years. But Nick didn't greet him, didn't follow up with enquiries. Heartless? Callous? Or just young? Just young and scared?)

As always, adversity brings out cruelty in some people, and Hollinghurst shows us that there's a lot of homophobia still sitting just beneath the surface of 1980s Britain.

When the Fedden family hears about the death of Pat Grayson (he's not only a friend of Rachel's, but also Catherine's godfather), the Tippers, who are their guests, react vilely. Sally says: "They're going to have to learn, aren't they, the... homosexuals." Nick replies, quite bravely: "It's a hard way to learn... but yes, we are learning to be safe."

In the debacle at the end, all Gerald's apparent liberal-mindedness melts away, and he accuses Nick of "attaching" himself to the family, and conspiring to undo them: "'I’ve been giving it some thought. It’s the sort of thing you read about, it’s an old homo trick. You can’t have a real family, so you attach yourself to someone else’s. And I suppose after a while you just couldn’t bear it, you must have been very envious I think of everything we have, and coming from your background too perhaps... and you’ve wreaked some pretty awful revenge on us as a result. And actually, you know...' he raised his hands, 'all we asked for was loyalty.'" This from the philandering, swindling, self-aggrandizing, lap-of-luxury-hogging Gerald...



Nick has been passing his blood tests, but at the end, he suddenly has the feeling that he might have stopped being lucky. The book closes as he's waiting for the next result. You're crossing your fingers for him, hoping against hope. I found this particularly poignant. One of my schoolfriends died of Aids in the mid-1990s, aged just 37. We'd lost touch many years before, but still, no person is an island, and you feel these things.

As Nick contemplates the possibility of an early demise, the book's final paragraph is unutterably poignant: "The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful."

It's also clever to close with the house, because it was such houses and their neighbourhood that formed Hollinghurst's inspiration: "The whole idea, when I look back on it, seems coupled in my mind with an image of Kensington Park Gardens, which is a longish, wide, treeless street. When I first came to London I lived at a friend’s flat in Notting Hill, and I used to walk along that grand street several times a week on my way to the swimming baths. It was dingier in those days and rather different from the gleaming millionaire’s row it is now. But I used to wonder what sorts of lives were led in those tall houses."



***

I could quote endlessly from this book. Hollinghurst observes so keenly; he has such a sharp eye for the vagaries of Britain in general, and 1980s Britain in particular. He describes so economically and effectively. He makes you think.

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