The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Jun. 21st, 2006 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine.
As the boom years of the mid-1980s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, while also pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An early affair with a young black council worker gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that brings into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.
I'd bought this after seeing the BBC announcement that they were making a tv adaptation (scripted by Andrew Davies) and started reading it before watching it. To be honest, if I'd finished reading the book, I wouldn't have watched the adaptation because the story just doesn't interest me at all, it doesn't convince me and I was particularly surprised to see that this had won the Man Booker Prize in 2004.
In particular, Nick is something of a non-entity. He's bland, superficial, unfailingly naive at times when you'd need a sub-literate IQ to be that disingenuous - he's nothing more than a cypher for the times and because the story is seen through his eyes, it suffers for it. I also had a huge issue with Catherine's character. She's a self-harmer and bi-polar and the only reason this seems to be relevant is so that Hollinghurst can use her as the means to bring the whole Fedden edifice down by revealing Gerald's affair with his assistant, you wonder how Catherine knew about it in the first place given that she seems to be out all the time. Nick explains this away by describing her as being very aware of what's going on, and if there was more of a relationship between her and her parents or her and the world in general then I'd have believed it - but there wasn't, so I didn't.
A lot is made of the gay sex scenes in the book. To be honest, they struck me as somewhat tame and whilst I could buy into Nick's casual regard for the dangers from gay sex, I never believed in his apparent carefree attitude towards possibly having contracted HIV. Leo is an interesting character - black, religious background and a council worker, but he's never developed and we never really get an explanation for why he and Nick break up. Wani never manages to engage - he's spoilt, rich, cocaine and porn addicted and seriously in denial where his father is concerned - there's no growth there on the page and because there's no growth with Nick either, the sympathy you should feel for his AIDs racked state that's ravaged his looks really evaporates.
I think that I could have forgiven if all if Nick has shown some spine in the end and stood up to the attacks from the destroyed Fedden family. But he just takes it like a little lapdog in one of those stereotypical "good day, sir!" scenes that left me cold. For a man who is so intrigued by beauty to be so lacking in passion is too jarring. Of course, a lot could probably be divined from Nick's character because of his research and love of Henry James, but given that I haven't read any Henry James (and on the basis of this, don't see it as something I'm likely to read in the near-future), it went totally over my head.
What I will say is that having grown up in the 80s, some of the images of excess did resonate with me but in the sense that I'd seen those same stylised scenes (e.g. Oxbridge grads getting drunk doing drugs and having sex in a country house) on the news and in other programmes rather than because they felt authentic.
The Verdict:
Disappointing, shallow, superficial - a lot like the 80s themselves, really. Didn't enjoy it (although I concede that it's written in an easy to follow manner), surprised it's won awards and wouldn't be interested in reading other works by the same author.
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine.
As the boom years of the mid-1980s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, while also pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An early affair with a young black council worker gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that brings into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.
I'd bought this after seeing the BBC announcement that they were making a tv adaptation (scripted by Andrew Davies) and started reading it before watching it. To be honest, if I'd finished reading the book, I wouldn't have watched the adaptation because the story just doesn't interest me at all, it doesn't convince me and I was particularly surprised to see that this had won the Man Booker Prize in 2004.
In particular, Nick is something of a non-entity. He's bland, superficial, unfailingly naive at times when you'd need a sub-literate IQ to be that disingenuous - he's nothing more than a cypher for the times and because the story is seen through his eyes, it suffers for it. I also had a huge issue with Catherine's character. She's a self-harmer and bi-polar and the only reason this seems to be relevant is so that Hollinghurst can use her as the means to bring the whole Fedden edifice down by revealing Gerald's affair with his assistant, you wonder how Catherine knew about it in the first place given that she seems to be out all the time. Nick explains this away by describing her as being very aware of what's going on, and if there was more of a relationship between her and her parents or her and the world in general then I'd have believed it - but there wasn't, so I didn't.
A lot is made of the gay sex scenes in the book. To be honest, they struck me as somewhat tame and whilst I could buy into Nick's casual regard for the dangers from gay sex, I never believed in his apparent carefree attitude towards possibly having contracted HIV. Leo is an interesting character - black, religious background and a council worker, but he's never developed and we never really get an explanation for why he and Nick break up. Wani never manages to engage - he's spoilt, rich, cocaine and porn addicted and seriously in denial where his father is concerned - there's no growth there on the page and because there's no growth with Nick either, the sympathy you should feel for his AIDs racked state that's ravaged his looks really evaporates.
I think that I could have forgiven if all if Nick has shown some spine in the end and stood up to the attacks from the destroyed Fedden family. But he just takes it like a little lapdog in one of those stereotypical "good day, sir!" scenes that left me cold. For a man who is so intrigued by beauty to be so lacking in passion is too jarring. Of course, a lot could probably be divined from Nick's character because of his research and love of Henry James, but given that I haven't read any Henry James (and on the basis of this, don't see it as something I'm likely to read in the near-future), it went totally over my head.
What I will say is that having grown up in the 80s, some of the images of excess did resonate with me but in the sense that I'd seen those same stylised scenes (e.g. Oxbridge grads getting drunk doing drugs and having sex in a country house) on the news and in other programmes rather than because they felt authentic.
The Verdict:
Disappointing, shallow, superficial - a lot like the 80s themselves, really. Didn't enjoy it (although I concede that it's written in an easy to follow manner), surprised it's won awards and wouldn't be interested in reading other works by the same author.
