Customer Reviews

Line Of Beauty, The

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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.

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.

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.

What a beautifully written, crafted, structured story. In these ways, it reminded me of the American novel A SECRET WORD by Paddock, with the layering, multifaceted effect of characters developing over time, and with its stunning honesty. There is in Hollinghurst's novel a frank liberalism, an openness to truth by way of ribald directness but also of subtle sweetness and vulnerability. Truth will come at you in all directions, in humor, in shock, in sadness, in joy. Nick is a character worth following, because he is you, because he is all of us. What a read! I recommend it highly.

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!

When I heard this book had won this year's booker prize over Mitchell's CLoud Atlas (which I loved) I was incredibly dissapointed. However, I've since read The Line of Beauty and it is truly worthy of the prize.

Beautifully written, full of complex characters and details of London in the 1980's. In a sense the protagonist, Nick Guest is a newer version of Charles Ryder from "Brideshead Revisited". Charles of course lives on to tell his story of his encounter with the aristocratic Marchmains, but Nick has a more ignominious end, and we are left to wonder just what the sum total of his experiences add up to during his years with the aristocratic Feddens. What is his point? Is it that charming little Oxford-educated gay boys are useful up to a point but in the end can be sacrificed on a whim, or that a promiscuous sex & drugs lifesytle leads to AIDS? Is Hollinghurst homophobic? Can't we interpret the 1980's any differently today? Evidently not.

bad storry line phony caracters boring long winded