Allan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

I'm usually hesitant to read contemporary British realist fiction but a friend recommended this and the premise was enticing. Set in the 1980s and book-ended by Thatcher's two successful elections, A Line of Beauty explores the world of upper-class Tory MPs and their Oxbridge educated children, particularly an interloper of sorts onto their scene. This is Nick Guest, his surname telling, who stays and eventually lives with the parents of his university chum and longterm crush, whose fatehr is an up and coming MP. Snugly cocooned in this crusty world Nick explores his sexuality, first with an older black council worker, later with an English-born son of multi-millionaire Supermarket-chain-owning Lebanese immigrants. Given its eighties Wall-Street-esque setting, 1980s tropes abound, lashings of cocaine and champagne, property development, rampant consumerism, vicious class divides, and the toffs say "Yah" for "Yeah". Here's a scene where Nick meets an old college chum for lunch who's become an investor:

It was nearly all men in the restaurant. Nick was glad he'd work his best suit and almost wished he'd worn a tie. There were sharp eyed older men, looking faintly harassed by the speed and noise, their dignity threatened by the ferocious youngsters who already had their hands on a new kind of success. Some of the young men were beautiful and exciting; a sort of ruthless sec-drive was the way Nick imagined their sense of their own power. Others were the uglies and misfits from their school playground who'd made money their best friend. It wasn't so much a public school thing. As everyone had to shout there seemed to be one great rough syllable in the air, a sort of 'wow' or 'yow'.

"It wasn't so much a public school thing" - it is now. Interestingly, I'm sure Hollinghurst chose this setting to compare it to contemporary Tory Britain (and almost-as-bad new Labour Britain) and emphasise just how bad it is. All of the scenes which are set up to satirise the vast wealth inequalities and absurd upper-class follies of the 1980s are dwarfed by what's happening under Cameron. Interesting too how he fits Thatcher into the story: literally, dancing with Nick at his surrogate father's wedding anniversary; and ideologically via her comments on buses:

Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience.

Hollinghurst is good with this, and even better in other moments. Music is well documented, and I believe informed by a near-colleague of mine (whose name escapes me) who used to run Harold Moores Records. The scene at Hampstead Heath steps out of reality and into some blissful erotically charged Eden. Other scenes are explored more accurately and in much greater depth than they would in most novels, various parties for instance, Hollinghurst vividly capturing each nuance of what goes through his characters' minds in these crucial moments. This I found to be the most interesting aspect of the book.

But his characters, all uniformly reprehensible, let it down and taint the whole endeavour. The volume of coke snorted starts to numb, and there are a good couple of hundred pages which should have been scrapped. The entire holiday episode was dreary, painful even, and all too soon I just wanted to leave these awful people and this awful world well alone. This ensured I left the book unhappy, where if he’d pruned and finished sooner he’d have gotten a better result.