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From Amazon
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.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel, recently longlisted for the Man Booker, delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used—not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols.The book is divided into three sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar in the making and a tripper in the fast gay culture of the time. The first section shows Nick moving into the Notting Hill mansion of Gerald Fedden, one of Thatcher's Tory MPs, at the request of the minister's son, Toby, Nick's all-too-straight Oxford crush. Nick becomes Toby's sister Catherine's confidante, securing his place in the house, and loses his virginity spectacularly to Leo, a black council worker. The next section jumps the reader ahead to a more sophisticated Nick. Leo has dropped out of the picture; cocaine, three-ways and another Oxford alum, the sinisterly alluring, wealthy Lebanese Wani Ouradi, have taken his place. Nick is dimly aware of running too many risks with Wani, and becomes accidentally aware that Gerald is running a few, too. Disaster comes in 1987, with a media scandal that engulfs Gerald and then entangles Nick. While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure. This is Nick coming home for the first and only time with the closeted Leo: "there were two front doors set side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn." This novel has the air of a classic.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just Beautiful!,
This review is from: The Line Of Beauty (Hardcover)
This novel is the winner of this year's Booker Prize over a book I loved and ardently supported, David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS. Did it deserve to beat out Mitchell's opus? Arguably, yes. Where Mitchell's magnificent novel is raw, vibrant, explosive, exciting, poetic, and prophetic, THE LINE OF BEAUTY is refined, subtle, understated, touching, eloquent, and reflective.There are few authors who can move a book at such a torturedly slow pace and still manage a success. The key to "The Line of Beauty" lies in the detail....Hollinghurst unfolds his characters with enormous pathos, keeping their quotes brief and allowing his observations about them to become expanded. Their is a dryness to his writing that seems endemic of British authors but remaining in that style allows the flavor of his characters to come through with great shades of color. This is not a fast-paced read, the way McCrae's KATZENJAMMER is, or the way some of the more well-known bestsellers are. But it is a great novel and should be read for its wonderful writing and style.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An amazingly crafted novel that will become a true classic,
By
This review is from: The Line Of Beauty (Hardcover)
The prose is worked with precision that makes continuous, but subtle, self-reference to Henry James' art; the themes are interwoven and all-encompassing but approached with an impressionist skill that allows the canvas of Thatcher's England of the early 80s to be perfectly and acurately drawn but with unnoticeable workmanship; the hero, Nick, carries with him and brings to a phenomenal yet human apothéose the 20th century notion of protagonist that is neither hero nor anti-hero: he is what most people were in 80s Britain: too lost to apply values. Behind it all, a philosophical attempt, not just as theme but a true quest of the author, to define Beauty. An amazing amazing piece of literature, worth reading over and over and over again.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
all style, no substance...,
This review is from: The Line Of Beauty (Paperback)
I just finished this book and I am still wondering what it's about. The author was clearly trying to emulate (and update) Evelyn Waugh, and this is where he clearly missed the mark. Buried between the author's long-winded passages of the otherwise boring lives of the British moneyed class (which by the 80's was well into decline) is an attempt to draw out a thin plot where nothing really happens to characters you do not really care about.If you want an engaging read with both style and substance, dust off "Brideshead Revisited", "Vile Bodies", or "Scoop" instead.
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