Review / The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

With Jamesian lightness of touch, and Waugh-like West London snobs, Alan Hollinghurst devastates with his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Peppered with moments of expert metacriticism, it is essentially, as protagonist Nick Guest describes James’s Spoils of Poynton:

“About someone who loves things more than people. And who ends up with nothing, of course. I know it’s bleak, but then I think it’s probably a very bleak book, even though it’s essentially a comedy.”

Hollinghurst submerges us in the shallow glamour of the 1980s, where racism and homophobia (particularly among the educated, ruling class) are casually bandied about and openly colour social hierarchies. Through a masterfully close third person view on Nick (who is only ever a Guest in the world of Thatcher’s elite), we are trained to focus on the most beautiful aspects of this world. Nick, up to the very end, is willing to overlook these dangerous by-products of his beloved beauty-producing systems (politics, the elite, the family, drugs) even as their dangers flood his peripheries—economic catastrophe, the terror of AIDs, shattering infidelity, addiction. His selfishness is reciprocated by those he chooses to surround himself with, namely the various members of the Fedden family, who after four years of treating him as one of their own, are unable to muster any loyalty when he most needs it.

There is a Jamesian quality to this as well: the tragedy of being destroyed by one’s own pursuits. When AIDs emerges as the ultimate destructive force in this novel, this concept gains potency. As carnivalesque, and increasingly liberated, bathhouse atmosphere rolls over to display its dark underbelly, we are left with both a desperate sense of hope for Nick and a sinking feeling of inevitability for his future.

It feels fitting that Cat, to whom he was most loyal, betrays him in the end—simply by letting his secrets out of the bag. Throughout, she plays the role of uncontrollable truth-teller, and while this may be her redemption, it still carries with it a certain selfishness that is hard to forgive. As a character, Cat most of all begs the question: what is the relationship between truth and beauty? Is beauty, as it often appears to be, only artifice, and only ever transient? Or are there structures that contain it in more solid forms? More importantly—is it worth devoting a life to? Though Hogarth’s ogee is the “line of beauty” from which the book draws its title, there is another line of beauty that is crossed time and again—where it becomes necessary to forsake beauty for the sake of survival. The ugliness of AIDs, of wealth, of infidelity, of addiction—won’t do to be ignored.