The Line of Beauty
Read it for the description alone.
“A novel so exquisitely written that at times it feels almost as if it could dispense with plot and characters and exist on a plane of pure perception and connotation.”- review in The Sunday Times
Just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004).
The review quote above says it all. As is my habit, I marked outstanding sentences as I read but I grew tired. The sentences never stopped. I was running low on stickie markers to annotate the phrases.
Hollinghurst’s world is a young gay man’s one in London in the eighties. The AIDS crisis is a prominent backdrop set within part of Margaret Thatcher’s time in office (1983-1987). The work has the tone of Evelyn Waugh in a modern era. It also is reminiscent of Henry James, whose work is referenced throughout.
The line of beauty in the title refers to the double “S” of the ogee shape in architecture, and the phrase is also used by protagonist Nick Guest to describe his lover Wani’s body. It also refers to a line of cocaine, taken up by multiple characters.
Here are some stand-out, sometimes incomplete, sentences, all of them lines of beauty:
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They looked at Boy George’s carmine smile and unusual hat. He wasn’t at all sexy to Nick, but he carried a large sexual implication.
… - from the dining room they heard only the hurried shape of her talk.
The shower-noise had stopped, and the robin skirled on, with sulky pauses and implacable resumptions.
… and [Nick] felt the gaze of the little crowd, like idle fingertips, run over him and come to rest, more tenderly and curiously, on Wani.
… the lazy but focused expression of a man who thinks of nothing but sex.
His eyes seemed to work on some imminent gratification, unfolding on a screen that hung between himself and the afternoon.
He felt the disadvantage of the clothed among the naked….
It was typical of Wani to dress up a command as a treat.
Handsomeness was neither here nor there with Ricky, it was his look of stupid certainty, the steady heat of him, the way you started in deep, as though the first kiss was an old kiss interrupted and picked up again at full intensity….
Everything in the bedroom interested him, it was dead and alive at once…
She played the beginning of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 like a courier starting a motorbike.
Young Jasper, no younger probably than Nick, but with his chancy just-out-of-school look, quick and lazy at the same time, his flirtiness, the assumption he knew you…
“You must be doing very well, dear,” she had said, in just the tone she would use to say “You don’t look very well, dear.”
… a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby’s interest but a compensation for his lack of it.
There had been a storm, but it was turning aside, and they saw suddenly how close the ground was, the sunlight passing in a crawling wink across ponds, glasshouses and canals, seams of gold flashing through the vapour in fiery collusion.