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Alan Hollinghurst: The Line Of Beauty


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I would say by a 4:1 majority my (reliable) friends think it's incredibly dull where nothing of nore happens and too much time is spent creating lovely sentences.

 

I'm in just the same situation. It is in my to read pile, but I only know one person who found anything to like in this book so I am reluctant to wade through it :shock:

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Guest Anonymous
This seems to be a love/hate book. I've not dared try it yet, but I would say by a 4:1 majority my (reliable) friends think it's incredibly dull where nothing of nore happens and too much time is spent creating lovely sentences. The others think it's just about the best book they've read in years.

 

When I was reading it, I remember being overwhelmed by its lack of activity for the first two hundred pages. The only thing that got me through those was the beautiful prose which ran unfaltering and unerring to the end of the novel. I daresay that I would have got more out of it if I had read more - well, any - Henry James.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Agreed that not much happens in The Line of Beauty. Undoubtedly the driving force for the reader is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose: not an action or thought is glossed over, every detail is intimately rendered, and the private admissions and concerns of Nick ring true and familiar throughout - with the possible exception of those moments "when he closed his eyes [and] phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark." And yet even this representation of a gay man - which at first seems demeaning and stereotypical in Nick's naively sexual appraisal of every man he sees - makes sense in the end, when I recognised that his mindset wasn't quintessentially gay, but just quintessentially male.

 

The impression too often is not that the characters aren't likeable, it's that they're not interesting. Nick is a terrible snob - most clearly displayed when he visits Leo's mother. Whereas the Feddens (and more significantly their extended family and associates) bow to the god of money, Nick bows to the god of beauty, disdaining the tastes of others just as money snobs will disdain the less well off. At one point, when one character praises Toby Fedden as 'handsome' and says 'he had all the luck,' Nick observes: "If looks are luck..." This clarifies that Hollinghurst intends us to view Nick critically, as it chimes with the central theme of his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library where the central character (Will?) traded on his gifted looks and ended up miserable, or at least stuck in a rut, where other characters who made efforts to rise above their born status - who worked at life - thrived.

 

I found that most of Nick's aesthetics were above my head. The first third of the book is subtitled The Love-Chord, but when this mysterious symbol appears in the text - a chord in Nick's head that chimes with thoughts of his budding sex life - it left me cold and baffled, just as all the business about 'the line of beauty' or 'ogee' did. If the central conceits of the book mean nothing to me, what hope is there for a truly informed reading of the book?

 

One of the main problems is that by the end we don't really know anything about Nick, or what he's like, other than that he has a taste for black men's arses, Henry James, and walnut whatnots. He evokes our sympathy only when he's put upon by former friends right at the end, and even then it's more pity than anything else. Although he occasionally expresses a thought to show that he disapproves of much of what the Feddens do and stand for, he almost never speaks it, or does anything about it, too comfortable in their nest, until necessity propels him out of it.

 

All in all it's a good book, I think, but not a great one. Hope this is of assistance to those of you still trying to decide whether or not to read it. If you want to taste Hollinghurst's fine prose in a (slightly) livelier setting, you could try his second novel The Folding Star.

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