Interview with Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst's extraordinarily rich novel The Line of Beauty. has garnered a new level of acclaim for the author after winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst speaks about his work in our interview.

Customer Reviews Average rating - 4.0

Rating - 5 Date: 2008-04-19
Content: One of the biggest challenges of any novelist is to provide a perspective that's accessible to us and helpful in understanding what's being portrayed. Alan Hollinghurst has achieved remarkable results by stationing his narrator, Nick Guest, outside of all the worlds he inhabits. Guest is like a spirit rising amused over the action that can draw us a picture while recording every sound that's created or uttered.

Here are the worlds that Guest helps us explore:

-Tory MP life during the Thatcher years
-Young Oxford graduates looking for a place
-A young man exploring his homosexuality
-Wealthy British on the make for more
-Middle-aged married life
-Inner life of a young manic-depressive

The book's overall theme is about everyday hypocrisy and the large price that has to be paid by those who pretend to be other than what they are and believe.

The story evolves in three time periods: 1983, 1986, and 1987. In all three years, Nick Guest resides with the family of an Oxford friend where the father is a rising conservative MP. Nick has an unofficial role as low-cost lodger to keep on eye on the friend's troubled sister. The family knows that Nick is looking for a boy friend and is open about accepting his sexuality. The three years give us a chance to learn more about the characters and to see how their relationships change. The 1987 period brings all that had been known in private into public with large consequences for all.

The book is filled with great scenes where nuances of knowledge, awareness, perception, accent, and perspective separate and unite the characters. Often, contrasting scenes occur back-to-back so that the contrasts are even more obvious. You'll gain a deeper insight into British society than you could on your own.

Ultimately, I feel that a work of fiction must be judged by how successfully it takes you into a world you have never been in before and allows you to understand that world much better. Any novel that can help me understand what it's like to be gay during the AIDS epidemic while giving me a strong sense of Thatcher's leadership has to be pretty terrific because those dimensions are outside my experience and normal reading.

As a person who enjoys art, I was most impressed by the way that the ogee was worked into the story to provide a connecting metaphor for our common humanity.

Bravo!


Summary: On the Outside, Looking In

Rating - 5 Date: 2007-12-27
Content: On one level, this exquisitely wrought novel is a social satire -- a wickedly frank view of the monetarily and politically privileged in Thatcher-era England as seen through the eyes of an insider Outsider. On a more personal level, it might be called a tragedy of manners, the first-person account of an all-too-flawed (some might say parasitic) hero whose hubris is his desire to belong. The rather too obviously named narrator, Nick Guest, seeks his place in the world among the sexually active homosexual set, the wealthy movers and shakers crowd, the aestheticist/intellectual exclusivists and the secret coterie of drug culture initiates. Nick's fall from grace stems from his careless disregard of the boundaries that separate them. AIDS, Margaret Thatcher, Henry James (Nick's thesis subject and literary godfather) and Cocaine are the spirits that reign over the proceedings, but they are not spirits who reside comfortably together.

Nick's sexual initiation with a lower-class black man takes place in the within the exclusive gated community where his hosts, the wealthy, politically ambitious Feddens, reside. Prophetically, this relationship is consummated in a chilly garden, the participants warmed by the compost heap they use for leverage. Sexual prowess and, later, drug use lead Nick to carelessness, blurring his sense of propriety. And although drugs and sex are the great equalizers that allow Nick entree into the world of his social betters, they ultimately bring about his expulsion from Society. Everything he desires, either betrays him or is betrayed by him. His college mate's family, of which he so desperately wants to be a member, actually regards him as a servant, the sister's keeper (a position at which he finally, catastrophically fails). His first lover casts him aside without explanation and his long-term partner, the stunningly handsome, wealthier-than-is good-for-him Wani, is too drug-addled and promiscuous to be capable of real love and regards their relationship as one of sexual convenience. It is this relationship that will, in the end, prove to be the undoing of Nick and those he most admires.

Hollinghurst's themes are appropriately Jamesian: the dilemma of the artist in an artless society (Wani's money-worshipping, boorish father incessantly refers to Nick as "the aesthete"), and the clash between an independent innocent and a corrupt though attractive feudal establishment. Symbolic details are handled delicately and effectively as in the case of photographic references. Nick is disappointed when a photo of his crowning moment in Society, his dance with the Prime Minister, does not appear in the tabloids. When a photo of him is, in fact, published, it is the scandalous catalyst of his expulsion from that society. And, as he leaves his long-time residence, he comes across a snapshot of his sexually unavailable schoolmate, Toby, for love of whom he came to stay in the Fedden household in the first place. The photo shows a beautiful, sexually alluring Toby as he once appeared in a school play, but whose real-life, indolent subject has subsequently gone to fat.

Nothing is what one hopes it will be and all desire is betrayal. The line of beauty is only skin deep, leaving "The Line of Beauty" a lovely portrait of unlovely, ultimately unlovable people.

Summary: Life among the plutocrats.

Rating - 5 Date: 2007-12-07
Content: In my estimation this will go down as one of the best pieces written in the English language this or any other century. I found the charaters believable and highly entertaining. I would imagine that many, many people, particularly gay men, would find Nick to be alot like themselves. I wanted to keep going back to the book, night after night as I was entranced with the story and the characters. Well written and thought provoking, what a beauty indeed.
Summary: What a Beauty indeed.

Rating - 5 Date: 2007-07-01
Content: I have to respond to the 1-star review because it's so angry and wrongheaded. As an author, I read very widely, but it's the rare book that makes me wish I had writtten it; that is, lived the experience and had the insight that brought this book to fruition. To have emerged from inside rather than approach it as a reader, if that makes sense.

Recently I've felt that with Ian McEwan's Atonement, Francine Prose's Blue Star, and Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty. Every line of this book is indeed a line of beauty--the sinuous prose matches the compelling story and I had to force myself to read it slowly, rather than gobble it down. I read many passages aloud to my spouse, who also was blown away.

I'm afraid it's been over a year since I read it, so I can't supply more details, but this novel that nods so much at James is actually the kind of book Balzac wrote, blending sex, politics, and money in a knowing commentary on his times, and I can't think of higher praise than that.
Summary: A Modern Cousin Bette

Rating - 1 Date: 2007-05-14
Content: I picked this book at random, off the shelves of a hotel we were staying in. I'd never heard of the author or the book but thought it must be good, or at least well-written, if it won the Booker Prize. In fact, I did nearly gave it five stars for sheer entertainment value because, after I'd read quite a bit of it, me and my partner took it in turns to read aloud random passages, which I assure anyone reading this, you'll find utterly hilarious if you do the same. However, in the spirit of being honest on Amazon, I'm actually giving it no stars because, trust me, all the humour in this book is of the unintentional variety.

This story reads as if it was written by someone with no personality of their own, just a lot of unexpressed mundane thoughts about the world which he's now using the excuse of a novel to finally express, unfortunately. There are endless descriptions of how a character thinks he might react to something that's just been said, but decides not to, and why he decides not to, and how his non-reaction might affect the speaker differently to how he'd be affected if he had actually said what he nearly said but didn't. All of which wouldn't be so bad if the things people think but don't say - or even what they do eventually get round to saying - were actually interesting. But they're not. If you want an example, check out the chapter that starts with a group of men in a restaurant discussing the 'pansy salad'. Which - what imagination! - turns out to be a euphemism for trying out homosexuality; also, one of them refers to a 'butch lettuce', and another says everyone should try it at least once - the pansy salad, that is, wink wink, nudge nudge. Now, this may well be an actual conversation the author had with his pals but if so, then he needs ask himself what anyone sitting next to his table would have thought if they'd overheard it (clue: it won't have been 'What a fascinating and truly funny group of men'). I don't often blush with embarrassment when reading a book but this one is so pathetically mediocre when it thinks it's profound, I actually found myself worrying about what anyone outside the UK would think of us when reading this pile of self-conscious under-powered quasi-intellectual twittering.

I thought the Booker Prize was given to outstanding writing, which to me means great themes expressed through brilliant prose, with memorable characters and inspiring dialogue. But on the strength of this lazy, badly written, small-minded, meandering 'story', it seems it's actually awarded to anything with a slightly obscure title that features characters who are as boring and predictable as most politicians. This kind of award gets me angry, because there are writers out there - often smeared because they work in a recognisable 'genre' - who produce truly thought-provoking work. Whereas this kind of mind-dribble is for awards judges who don't know how to think for themselves, to recommend to readers who also don't know how to think for themselves.
Summary: Is that a cucumber in your pansy salad?