The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Summary
Nick Guest, twenty and just down from Oxford, moves into the attic of a house in Notting Hill belonging to the family of his college friend Toby Fedden. Gerald Fedden is a newly elected Conservative MP on his way up. Nick is writing a thesis on Henry James, is gay, and is completely in love with the Feddens' world without ever quite belonging to it.
The novel covers 1983 to 1987 in three long sections, so the reader watches the Thatcher boom from inside a house where it is being enjoyed. There are cocaine, country weekends, a visit from the Prime Minister herself, and a relationship with the son of a Lebanese supermarket millionaire that Nick keeps entirely separate from his hosts. Behind it, gathering, is AIDS.
Hollinghurst writes it as a comedy of manners in the Jamesian mode and it is extremely funny about class, but the funniness is a trap. When the book turns, in the last hundred pages, it is merciless about exactly how conditional Nick's welcome always was.
It contains explicit gay sex, written without apology, which was much of what the coverage fixed on at the time. It is also one of the best English novels about the 1980s that anyone has written.
Long, slow in the best way, and unusually good on the physical pleasure of beautiful things. Readers who like Evelyn Waugh or Henry James himself will recognise the machinery at once, and readers who want plot should be warned that almost everything here is manners until it is not.
Historical Context & Significance
The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004 and was immediately labelled by the press as the first gay novel to win, a description that flattened a good deal of history but captured why the result mattered.
Alan Hollinghurst had been writing openly about gay life since The Swimming Pool Library in 1988, and the win brought that body of work into the mainstream. Several tabloids covered the prize primarily through the sex scenes, which made the point about conditional acceptance rather neatly.
The novel was adapted by the BBC in 2006. It has since become a standard text on courses about the 1980s and about the AIDS crisis in Britain, and its reputation has grown steadily as the decade it describes has receded far enough to be studied.