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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2004, 400 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2005, 400 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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'Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. He writes the best prose we have today'. Winner of the 2004 Booker Prize.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
I
PETER CROWTHER'S BOOK on the election was already in the shops. It was called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillon's had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a "mordant analyst": his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There was clearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of course. The book's mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs, but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of "The 101 New Tory MPs", in which he'd been clever enough, or quick enough, to ...
Booker Prize
2004
The Line of Beauty, winner of last year's Mann Booker prize, is
Hollinghurst's fourth novel following The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The
Folding Star (1994) and The Spell (1998). Hollinghurst has
gained a reputation for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect
prose, but here his emphasis is more on, what he sees as, the vast divide
between the ruling class and everyone else. The book is
divided into three parts, all set in London during the 1980s, the decade defined
in many ways by Margaret Thatcher (Conservative/Tory Prime Minister from
1979-1990). In the first part, set in 1983, we meet our protagonist Nick
Guest, freshly arrived from Oxford and living in the house of Tory MP Gerald
Fedden, at the request of Gerald's son Toby. Nick quickly becomes the
confidante of Catherine, Toby's manic-depressive sister, loses his virginity to
a black council worker and enters a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at
ancestral homes attended by top financiers and politicians. During the
next four years we follow Nick as he goes (in the words of Kirkus Reviews) 'from
a virginal 20-year-old to a wizened 24-year-old'.
As many reviewers point out, Nick is less interesting as a character as he
is as an observer, much as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is more
interesting for his observations of the 'careless people' than as a character in
his own right. Reviewers compare The Line of Beauty to the writing
of Trollope, Waugh, Proust and Henry James (the latter comparison is
unsurprising considering the 400-plus pages of the novel are littered with
references to Henry James).
It has received glowing reviews from many; for
example The Observer (UK) describes it as 'a classic of our times… The work of a great English stylist in full
maturity; a masterpiece'.
..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Edmund White
Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. He writes the best prose we have today. Geoff Dyer
For once the jacket blurb is not hyperbole—it really is his finest novel.
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