The Line of Beauty
When the book came out, I decided against reading it, and I should probably have stuck to the resolution if I hadn't been seduced by unlikely circumstances. We were tracing our way through the Duty Free stile at Heathrow's Terminal Three, on the way home from Istanbul, when I spied a thickish paperback edition on display at one of the booksellers'. I was surprised that The Line of Beauty was out in paper already, and my pique was redoubled when, after lunch, I couldn't find the bookseller that had been touting the book. Caprice took over from here: I became determined to put my hands on a copy. (Insert image of Great White Duty Free Hunter; snort.) Of course there were other booksellers offering the very same EXCLUSIVE EDITION (ONLY AT THIS AIRPORT) - a new UK marketing gambit, evidently. I suspect that if I put my mind to it, I could make my purchase of The Line of Beauty sound as whimsical and self-contradictory as anything in the novel itself.
I didn't want to read The Line of Beauty because I didn't want to read another gay novel by Alan Hollinghurst. The Swimming Pool Library had been quite enough; not only was it self-absorbed, but Paul Golding's The Abomination covered much the same turf with far darker magic. As it happens, however, Beauty is not a gay novel. It is simply a novel. The protagonist's tastes - and for once we have a narrator who is the protagonist, not just an articulate observer of wild goings-on - are certainly homosexual. But Mr Hollinghurst writes as though we know all about what that means in general, and only tells us the few things that make Nicholas Guest, his hero for the nonce, different in particular. Nick is a "chocoholic," meaning that he is turned on by black men. There are worse afflictions, if indeed this is one. (And I suppose that it is, really, to have any preconceived idea of one's love, an affliction - an affliction suffered by almost every human being alive.) We are not even told, in so many words, that Nick is a "top" - we can figure that out for ourselves. Homosexuality in The Line of Beauty is an issue only because, in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, it is still disreputable.
Continue reading about The Line of Beauty at Portico.
