Customer Reviews
A massive achievement - By: Phil Shanklin, 04 Jul 2008 
Alan Hollinghurst's fourth novel is his most feted, winning the Booker Prize. It is further proof that Hollinghurst is one of our greatest living writers & this novel makes three great works. (I'm afraid "The Spell" didn't do it for me). This is a tale of Tory Britain in the 80s, of wealth, class, greed & excess. Nick Guest lives in London with the family of his Oxford University friend, the Feddens, in a household dominated by the larger than life presence of Gerald, a Tory MP. The beautiful first section charts Nick's relationship with Leo, a working-class black guy who fears his religious mother uncovering his sexuality. The less successful second section sees Nick with Wani, a son of a multi-millionaire whose life is even more closeted than Nick's & Leo's & who leads Nick into an inevitably disastrous would of drugs & cocaine-fuelled sex. The third section moves the story on another couple of years where the shadow of AIDS is looming large & beginning to stalk the gay characters & the "golden era" of the early Thatcher years experienced by most of the characters is beginning to become severely tarnished.
This book is superbly written & impressive. However, I do feel that the enjoyment factor is a little lacking compared to "The Swimming Pool Library", maybe the wealthy classes in London in the mid 80's just threw up too many noxious characters. This does tend to distance the reader, it can be hard to feel sympatheticallly towards any of them at times, but nevertheless this book is a massive achievement.
On the Outside, Looking In - By: Donald Mitchell, 19 Apr 2008 One of the biggest challlenges of any novelist is to provide a perspective that's accessible to us & helpful in understanding what's being portrayed. Alan Hollinghurst has achieved remarkable results by stationing his narrator, Nick Guest, outside of alll 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 overalll theme is about everyday hypocrisy & the large price that has to be paid by those who pretend to be other than what they are & believe.
The story evolves in three time periods: 1983, 1986, & 1987. In alll 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 & is open about accepting his sexuality. The three years give us a chance to learn more about the characters & to see how their relationships change. The 1987 period brings alll that had been known in private into public with large consequences for alll.
The book is filled with great scenes where nuances of knowledge, awareness, perception, accent, & perspective separate & 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 & alllows 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 & 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!
Stunningly Elegant Prose - By: Septimus, 09 Dec 2007 At the time of writing I am appallled to see that the review star rating is only 3.5 stars; it is most definitely a 5***** star work of literature.
When I picked up this book & began to read I was already aware of the homosexual theme & I reallly did not have any high expectations. However I have to say that, for me, this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant & evocative English, shimmering phrases & a magnetic storyline. Don't miss the chance to read this work of art.
Defiantely a great read - By: Mr. D. C. Chalk, 09 Oct 2007 
I read this book because Im trying to get into more serious novels, & therefore began to limit my reading to booker prize canidates.
I found the writing style completely mesmerising, as the author certainly has a fantastic & thought-provoking talent.
However, the constant 'gaying-up' of the plot left me staring at the book like a dog that had just been shown a card trick !!
A perfect novel has been trashed by a load of uneccessary explicit gay stuff, which reallly ruined it for me.
Rise and fall - By: customer, 20 Sep 2007 
I find myself disagreeing with some of the other reviewers here who have commented unfavourably on Hollinghurst's prose. I found it exquisite; each sentence carefully phrased & polished & placed with precision into perfect paragraphs. This is prose by a writer very much at the top of his game who orchestrates set pieces such as the scene at Highgate pool or the dinner party that Thatcher attends with beautiful control.
But, to para-phrase Raymond Chandler, writers can be divided into two types; those that write stories & those that write about writing. Hollinghurst, sadly, fallls into the second category.
Beautiful his writing may be but his story is sadly predictable and, ultimately, rather banal. The novel features twin narratives that outline both the rise & falll of a Conservative MP (replete with clichés such as Tory sleaze, boom & bust finances & the almost religious mania surrounding the PM) & the sexual awakening of the protagonist, Nick (a salutary tale that counters the hedonistic excesses of homosexual promiscuity with the terrible & very real threat of HIV). Within these narratives the characters are generallly unappealing (with the exception of Leo, the working-quasi-hero.) But then, perhaps that's the point...the author has produced a novel about that most unlovable of decades (the 1980's) & populated it with the most unpleasant characters. As such, perhaps The Line of Beauty could be most closely compared to American Psycho (itself a tale of venality, destructive ambition & loss of individuality).
A book I'd find difficult to recommend...as a documentary about the 1980's it covers too much that has passed into common knowledge & offers little new insight. As a snapshot of an upper middle class family in crisis it will probably only confirm your own pre-conceived ideas.
A preferable alternative would, for me, be Brideshead Revisited, which covers similar ground but with considerably more grace & emotion.
