The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

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With Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel just published I checked if the Library had a copy, and ended up reserving all the Hollinghurst novels they had.

I found that I encountered some of the same frustrations with The Line of Beauty as I did with The Swimming Pool Library – in part it feels needlessly long, I think you could probably cut a quarter of the text and still tell the same story (but clearly the Booker Prize judges would disagree!). It is also a tale of privilege, although Nick’s place in this world of privilege is not secure, indeed when the dramatic punch comes it comes in the form of the rug of privilege being pulled from under Nick.

The edition I read includes a short afterword from Hollinghurst, penned in 2011 seven years after the first publication of this novel. In it he reflects on how The Swimming Pool Library was set and written on the eve of the HIV/AIDS crisis but then published at its height gave it a particular but unintended reception, the reader knowing what is to come, the characters unaware and unprepared. And so in writing The Line of Beauty (his fourth novel) set in three episodes in 1983, 1986, and 1987, he felt called to address HIV/AIDS directly.

The way that he recounts not just the illness but the shame is powerful, taking us to that moment – the backlash that Nick experiences at a personal level was also played out at a societal level – as he is shunned so Section 28 is placed into statute. The person and the political are ever one.