The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker prize in 2004 - I've just finished it, and found it very readable indeed. However, it seems to have had mixed reviews; as well as the Booker, an article in the Guardian described it as Little Britain meets Evelyn Waugh. I think that's unfair - it was much better than that, but I can see where it came from.
Hollinghurst makes no secret of his love for, knowledge of, and debt to Henry James, who is referenced throughout. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar, engaged in writing up a PhD on James. I've never read any James, except The Turn of the Screw years ago - he's one of those writers whose work I've always kept at the back of my mind, unread, waiting for the space I hope I'll have in old age. I do know that his work is dense, with long, ornate sentences, and Hollinghurst has produced what I imagine must be a deliberate pastiche of James's style.

I found much of the writing thrilling, and gloried and luxuriated in the prose style. Some of Hollinghurst's sentences made me breathless with admiration at times, and left me smiling at their audacity and sheer style. The Guardian review describes the prose as 'restrained' - I couldn't agree less; it's anything but.

The novel is set in the early-to-mid 1980s, and follows Nick's fortunes, after he leaves Oxford. Just down from Oxford, he lodges in Kensington, at the home of the Fedden's, whose son Toby, is a friend from Oxford, and Gerald Fedden, Toby's father, is a Tory MP married to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. Nick comes from a relatively humble, provincial background, so the book therefore offers an outsider's view of the comfortable middle-to-upper classes in London during the early-to-mid-1980s, as they became rich under the Thatcher government, becoming almost drunk on success and money. Nick is attempting to complete his PhD, and remains an aesthete, while all around him are philistines,building lucrative careers in politics or finance.
Few of the characters are likeable - the only one I warmed to was Catherine, Toby's emotionally and psychologically fragile sister, another outsider, who periodically supplies a caustic commentary on the excesses of her surroundings. There are several set pieces throughout the book - one of most delicious being the appearance of Thatcher herself at a party at the Feddens She's dressed in a lavishly-spangled jacket, prompting Catherine to comment that 'she looks like a country-and-western singer'.
Cocaine-snorting and gay sex sometimes dominate the narrative, becoming increasingly tedious, and this, I think, ultimately damages the book. It sagged horribly in the middle, I thought, but rallied at the end; I wouldn't have given it the Booker, but there is much to enjoy.