I have been doing an absolutely atrocious job on the mission I, among others in the blogging fraternity, embarked on at the tail end of last year to make our way through the winners of the Man Booker prize. Not only have I lost my list of the winners but I have failed to read a single one of them (excluding those I’ve read before obviously) until last week. Laziness is a curse, I know.
Last week, however, I was fortunate enough to pick up Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and, gosh, wasn’t it pretty. The title refers to a phrase coined by William Hogarth in his rather famous The Analysis of Beauty to describe a certain S-bend that, in Hogarth’s mind, gave us a jolt of visual pleasure (well I’m paraphrasing but that’s my interpretation). This book gave me several jolts of not-so-visual pleasure.
Sceptics among you may suggest I only like this novel because it involves terribly English, terribly good looking boys having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs but, while I do appreciate all of these things, the book itself is so prettily written, delivering up absolute corkers of sentences that quite literally had me rereading them and rereading them in the hope of committing them to memory, that the hot sex and the drugs sort of fall away into the background. Even Margaret Thatcher’s presence about halfway into it – surely the perfect cold shower – failed to dent my appetite for this book.
Unintentionally or not the book also has parallels with that great favourite of mine The Great Gatsby: a narrator (called Nick) finds himself thrown together with the very rich and powerful and gets caught up in its pull. Except this time instead of the roaring 20s it’s the soulless 80s and instead of the elegant Gatsby we get politicians.
Sceptics among you may suggest I only like this novel because it involves terribly English, terribly good looking boys having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs but, while I do appreciate all of these things, the book itself is so prettily written, delivering up absolute corkers of sentences that quite literally had me rereading them and rereading them in the hope of committing them to memory, that the hot sex and the drugs sort of fall away into the background. Even Margaret Thatcher’s presence about halfway into it – surely the perfect cold shower – failed to dent my appetite for this book.
Unintentionally or not the book also has parallels with that great favourite of mine The Great Gatsby: a narrator (called Nick) finds himself thrown together with the very rich and powerful and gets caught up in its pull. Except this time instead of the roaring 20s it’s the soulless 80s and instead of the elegant Gatsby we get politicians.
Strongly recommended if you’re into 1)boys, 2)elegant sentences 3)Henry James (yeah as with other Hollinghurst HJ is basically an unseen character in this book). I loved it.
