Review

The Line of Beauty

By Alan Hollinghurst

Published by Picador

Nick Guest, the protagonist, a young, gay, bookish aesthete and Oxford graduate, has recently arrived in London to start postgraduate research into 'style' in the work of Henry James.

Guest, by name and nature, is something of a cuckoo, and taking up lodgings in the Notting Hill home of his Oxford friend Toby (son of rising Tory star Gerald Fedden and his elegant wife Rachel), seeks to become a part of the new family he so admires.

As he embarks on a rapturous affair with black council worker Leo, Nick is also entrusted with the care of the Fedden's fragile, unpredictable and manic-depressive daughter, Catherine, whose indiscretion and love of truth make her a ticking bomb always threatening to explode.

At ease in, but oblivious to, a world casually studded with fine art and antiques, the Feddens are philistines who consult Nick like a pocket-guide to culture. Their motivation is purely social and political and underscores a series of blackly comic and beautifully observed set pieces: social gatherings at the Feddens, Toby's birthday party at his uncle Lord Kessler’s, a party attended by ‘the Lady’, Prime Minister Thatcher; and a break in France at the Feddens' manoir.

But Nick, both an observer and an eager participant in the eighties hotbed of sex, drugs and money, embodies the sickness at the heart of their world, as the threat of AIDS casts its long shadow over the book. The acutely observed period detail is reinforced by references to contemporary culture, such as the Face and Spitting Image (on which Gerald longs to achieve the notoriety of a puppet in his own image).

This is a book about beauty seen through a prism of ugliness. The title refers to a theory put forward by the 17th-century painter Hogarth, who postulated that anything living, anything natural, is best described with an 's' shaped curve, while dead artefacts are portrayed by a straight line. The line of beauty for Nick alternates between the male arse and Hogarth's Ogee arch, which lends its name to the style magazine that he works on sporadically, between coke-fuelled threesomes with the magazine's backer, the beautiful, brittle and fabulously wealthy supermarket heir, Wani Ouradi.

This is a long, subtle and intelligent novel, as thick and rich as most of its upper-class characters. Hollinghurst's wry observations of the English upper classes have their roots in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, and there are echoes of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, as well as Nick’s own consciously ponderous late-Jamesian style of prose. This is one of the worthiest Booker-winners in years. A novel to stand the test of time.

Reviewed by Huw Molseed and Sarah MacDougall

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