In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you I am compromised and perhaps, on this occasion, cannot discharge my reviewing duties as honourably as I normally would. Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful, delectable, novel, The Line of Beauty, concerns the life of a young man during the peak years of Thatcherite Britain. A period some ten years before I was even born, but one that chances of fate and birth mean I struggle to be wholly indifferent towards. I was not born a miner’s son, no. Quite the opposite – my grandfather was a very significant Conservative MP. I am tainted, I suppose, by this. By his ghostly shadow – he died when I was very small – and his books upon the wall, even as I write this now. Whether in action or reaction, this fact is a big annoying reality, one I try to avoid in life, yet ever fail to.
I know that readers here are scattered across the earth. It can be hard to understand the strength of the feelings that Margaret Thatcher earned for herself. When she died – which I do remember – it was startling to me to see so many people cursing the “witch” who now was gone. Yet many loved her, more quietly perhaps, and she repeatedly won large majorities in parliament. Whether one views her as an industry-destroying monster who robbed thousands of their jobs in the mines, or a hero for the aspiring who opened the way to middle-class property-ownership and general prosperity, her policies and personal values touched everyone in the United Kingdom, for better or worse. After a period of relative stagnation, Thatcher brought something new. The “Big Bang”, a sudden and large amount of financial deregulation in 1983, could describe the whole period – it was an explosion of change, with individuals free left to figure out the consequences and opportunities for themselves. Those who could, anyway.
Into this world steps the hero of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest. Young, fresh out of Oxford but not particularly rich or privileged, he embodies the upward social mobility of the times. A friendship of sorts with one Toby Fedden at Oxford gives him the chance to live with Toby’s family in London while he pursues further studies in Henry James and his style. The Feddens are a family with no need for social mobility. Gerald, the father, is a newly-minted MP in 1983, while his wife Rachel brings old money and further status to his affairs. Besides Toby, there’s also a daughter, Catherine, whose depressions are carefully hidden from the outside world.
Nick lives with the Feddens for the full four year period covered by The Line of Beauty, even as he finishes studies and begins work with another Oxonian friend, the Lebanese Wani Ouradi. The Ouradis, who have made their massive fortune in grocery stores, are another side of a changing Britain. The father is made a lord, the son is sent to Harrow. While the father may be spoken of, behind his back, in terms of racism and dismissal, the same cannot be said for the son. Wani, through his integration into the boarding school system, has already become more British – in a way – than Nick could ever hope to be.
Nick’s relationship with Wani continues his upward social climb by providing the financial support needed to solidify – at least, for a time – the social benefits conferred by his friendship with the Feddens. Wani’s wealth is so great that at one point he gives Nick five thousand pounds just so Nick stops asking him to pay him for smaller things. By the end of the novel, Wani has given Nick plenty more. The reason for such generosity is not merely that they are friends or that Wani is rich, but rather that Wani and Nick are sexual partners. For, complicating the linear progression of the novel, from rags to riches, namelessness to front-page news, is the simple fact that Nick is gay.
The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults in the UK, but a law of the land is not a law of the mind, and Nick’s sexuality exists in an ambiguous field – tolerated, rather than quite accepted, by the novel’s characters. “They’re absolutely fine with it”, Nick says to his first boyfriend of the Feddens’ knowledge of his sexuality, then adds to himself – “as long as it’s never mentioned.” The tension is light enough that we may not notice it at first. Nick’s sexual self-discovery – for he was eventually “out” in Oxford, but remained a virgin nevertheless – seems to be linked with his other advances, all these positive things happening at once to him. In the first section of the novel, “The Love-Chord”, Nick’s romance with a young Black council worker is full of excitement and affection, as he’s initiated into the world of gay sex.
When we jump to 1986 for the novel’s main section, this innocent discovery and pleasure at the world is already gone. Leo, the council worker, has vanished – we do not learn why until much later – to be replaced by Wani. Suddenly, Nick is addicted to cocaine – the one drug whose identity is so tightly bound to money and (apparent) worldly success, and which he does together with Wani. The sex, loving with Leo, has become somewhat sordid. Wani is a risk-taker who enjoys picking people up for threesomes and is addicted to pornography. It’s hard not to read this, within the novel, as a kind of decay. Just as the sexual and physical pleasures reach their peaks, the moral content of Nick’s life is emptying out. He is no longer studying, the relationship with Wani is totally secret, and he seems utterly directionless even as his money and status grow.
Through Gerald Fedden, Hollinghurst develops the idea of contrast further. Gerald is driven to grow his own power through his politics and his money through business. He is on the up. Yet his love for the prime minister – who is a constant background presence in the novel but is never named – is a point of tension when the man has a wife to give his attention to. For their silver wedding anniversary, Gerald and Rachel have a party where Thatcher attends, and we see quite clearly how he struggles to balance his desire to impress both women. Nick later discovers that Gerald’s family man appearance is at least in part an act, when he finds him and his secretary in a compromising position behind the scenes at a campaign event.
The difference between illusion and reality is one of the clearest thematic oppositions of the novel. As in our own world, people live within one of their own imagining. Gerald has an admirer on his street called Geoffrey, who is convinced of Gerald’s merits until the crisis of the novel’s final section forces him to understand otherwise. The Ouradis believe, or wish to, that their son is not gay, and pay a young lady to pretend to be his girlfriend, and then fiancée, to maintain the illusion. The drugs consumed by the wealthy characters are also tools for the creation of another picture of reality, as the text shows by drawing repeated attention to the performance of Nick and Wani socially before and after they have visited the bathroom for a quick hit of cocaine. Being trapped within illusions is not, either, the sole prerogative of the rich. Leo brings Nick home to meet his mother, who staunchly refuses to believe that her son could be gay or that Nick could be anything other than a mere friend.
Illusions can remain solid, or become fragile and break. Rather than the sudden collapses at the novel’s end, the more interesting illusions are those that are slowly undermined as the novel progresses. We follow Nick throughout The Line of Beauty. It is his novel, his consciousness that we watch, his prejudices we live. His relationship with Leo, the council worker, is interesting in this regard for revealing the negative impacts upon the people he works with of Thatcher’s policies. Nick, however, chooses to ignore them, just as the Feddens choose to ignore the negative reputation of Gerald’s business partner until he has already been fleeced by him, and as the Conservative party chooses to ignore the Ouradis’ class and ethnic background while they can accept significant donations from them. We have a sense that while things are good, boundaries and identities can shift and be safely blurred. Unfortunately, as in life, the music soon stops.
The moral decay of the upper classes, drugs and sex and power in all their attraction and distraction and destruction – these are time-honoured things. Indeed, coinciding with my reading of The Line of Beauty I also plunged into the show Succession, about the succession crisis for the aging patriarch of a large US media conglomerate. Excellent also, the merging of themes in both works (illusion, drugs, lies) did make me uneasy as to why one might choose the novel over the show, besides the period colour of the Thatcher years and the prominence of gay sex in the book. Even the period of Succession’s filming (starting in 2018) has coincided with particularly poor moral performance of the United States, at least when viewed from across the pond, as the Thatcher years may be viewed today.
The answer has to be Hollinghurst’s language, and the filtering effect of Nick’s consciousness. Language is important here – Nick aims to become an expert on Henry James’s use of the stuff, after all. All of those classic tropes of fiction written in the shadow of class consciousness are here. Of Rachel Fedden we hear how Nick “loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement.” When we read the dialogue of the novel we must be willing, as we might with a novel of the 19th century, to read the language as a dance of concealment and revelation, as when Catherine Fedden has a breakdown which must be suppressed by the language of the guests at a dinner: “an emotional young lady” says one, “a very emotional young lady” says another – empty phrases preferable to acknowledging an unpleasant fact.
The language of something like Succession is masterful, but in that case it is a mastery of swearing and comic insults rather than subtlety. One might be tempted to say this is a difference of temperament between American and British national characters, but it’s fairer, I think, to note the differences of the media. In television we have too much to work with – acting, backgrounds, music, action – so that language can be lost or become of secondary importance. The limitations of prose also serve to focus attention upon what it can do well, and the deliberateness of each choice of word and phrase. Prose also goes at our own pace, whereas television is propelled onwards unless we reach for the pause button – for this reason too, it seems to ask for a holistic appraisal, rather than close reading. Or close watching, I suppose.
Prose also allows for the theme of illusion to work better than it perhaps would in film or television. Nick’s illusions become our illusions, his evasions become our small opportunities to see what he refuses to notice. We see the Thatcherite years both as a bounteous becoming in the first part, then as a desperate attempt to enjoy things in the second part, before finally witnessing their collapse in the third part. Yet at the same time we can see the direction of travel, even as Nick avoids it: the presence of AIDs long before it is named, the prejudices against gays and foreigners that are neatly ignored so long as the money flows, the sense that not everyone is benefitting from the Conservative government.
This might just be so much guff from me, as usual. Especially as it only took two years from publication before there was a television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. Clearly the prose could live just as easily as spoken words, after all! It’s a good novel, well-made and well-written. To a certain extent, as an assassination of Britain’s ruling elite, it reminded me of the Patrick Melrose novels. But where Edward St Aubyn’s novels each take place over a continuous time period (with one exception), The Line of Beauty is more comfortable varying its scenes. This, to me, makes it seem technically more accomplished. I also amassed a staggering number of new words in the back of my copy, so clearly Hollinghurst has done a good job eating the dictionary.
I think what makes the novel worth reading is the way it manages to portray a very historically contested period without seeming overly partisan. Naturally, the rich are rude, prejudiced toffs, but that’s hardly news – indeed, I don’t think they would find that surprising either. They, (we?), would probably laugh at the accusation. Rather than focusing on either the suffering caused by Thatcher’s policies, or solely on the glamour, the novel shows it as a time of possibilities, good and bad. “I was lucky. And then I was… careful” – so speaks Nick of how he avoided contracting HIV. Just the same can be said of his experience of 1983-1987. Luck means that he comes out of the final pages rich in spite of his relatively lowly origins, with valuable knowledge gained at a painful price, but not one too hard to bear.
Yet we know that it could have been otherwise, that things are fragile. This is a valuable lesson, in our own turbulent times, as well.