The Line Of Beauty.

I was stuck in a coffee shop at a major international airport recently when an attractive young lady said, ‘Aren’t you Dick Headley?’ Here we go again I thought, another groupie, but no, she wanted to give me a book. I was in a bit of a hurry so I thanked her and stuck it in my bag for later. It turned out to be ‘The Line Of Beauty’ by Alan Hollinghurst.

The novel tells the story of Nick Guest a shy outsider type who meets Toby Fedden at University and moves in with his family. First as a guest (get it?) then as a lodger. The father, Gerald Fedden, is an MP, his wife Rachel is from a wealthy Jewish family and the daughter Catherine is manic-depressive. Nick himself is middle-class but he’s obviously fascinated by wealth. Hello I thought, shades of ‘Brideshead Revisited’. But there’s more than a touch of Fitzgerald here too. They live in Kensington Park Gardens, they have a Guardi over the mantelpiece but they’re still pretty crass. Or naff as Princess Di might have put it. What you have is the belle époque, drugs and genitalia. A bunch of bloody bourgeois snobs is running the country, showing off to each other and snorting coke off editions of Henry James. McJoyce would love this lot.

About halfway through the first chapter I started thinking it might be a bit overwritten. But I kept going and I soon got used to it. Sentences like…

"It was a mystery to him that fat old Polly, who was rutted with acne scars and completely lacking in ordinary kindness, had such a conspicuous success with men. In college he had brought off a number of almost impossible seductions, from kitchen boys to the solemnly hetero Captain of Boats. Nothing that lasted, but startling triumphs of will, opportunism and technique, even so."

That’s very well crafted writing. Not so much flowery as elegant and precise. There’s a lot of stuff like that. The writer is an aesthete. He’s also gay so you get a lot about AIDS and some very descriptive gay sex passages which may not be everyone’s cup of tea. When Nick loses his virginity to Leo, a black council worker, in the garden, I think it’s fair to say the author is indulging himself in a bit of homo-erotica. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It doesn’t exactly add anything to the narrative but it doesn’t detract either. Sex trumps class.

There are some superb vignettes…a trip to France, an English village fete, lavish parties etc. and Nick gets himself involved in a media scandal but what I liked best is the perspective on the Thatcher years. Mrs.T, the Lady herself, makes a cameo appearance at a party given by the Feddens. Unfortunately she doesn’t bring her husband. It would have been nice to have Denis doing a few lines in the bathroom after the party whilst getting his cock sucked by Nick’s rich Lebanese chum, Wani. But that might be going a bit too far. Hollinghurst doesn’t miss a chance to equate the Thatcher years with decadence. He may have a point. I certainly wasn’t complaining. Those were the years when I made a killing in real estate, divorced my wife and discovered the fleshpots of Thailand.

Anyway it’s not a bad read. It’s long, 500 pages but nobody said you have to read it all at once. And maybe the storyline is a bit on the thin side. It doesn’t matter. The writer paints a vivid picture of an era and I found plenty to keep me interested. It would make a good TV mini-series…hang on…it already did.