The Line of Beauty

I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about at college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. 

(Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby)

In Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is a satellite to the Jazz Age: the functional collector of information in the glittering cosmos of West Egg.  Gatsby reveals his buried love for Daisy to Nick, and Tom also confides in him his affair. In a selfish society predisposed to talk, the listener is king: with every man shouting his success to the rafters, everyone's success goes unnoticed - it becomes a trading floor of white noise- what is needed is a listener on the other line to confirm their stock is valued, that they have a personality worth buying into.

Gatsby's Nick Carraway.

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty is I believe The Great Gatsby transposed to the Thatcher age. Just as Gatsby begins with a procession of parties, Line does too with Gerald Fedden's elevation to Parliament inciting a succession of soirees. The year is 1983 and the Tories have won a landslide election, owed largely to the 'successful' Falklands campaign. Everything is rosy in the garden of conservatism: Mrs Thatcher, the dominatrix of Downing Street, has another opportunity to crack the whip at her increasingly masochistic electorate. The ensuing celebrations heralding her second coming are lavish affairs, scored classically by an orchestra of men chinking glasses and toasting the leader they love. This is a golden time for greed in England.

Gerald Fedden, the newly elected MP, is leader of the house in Notting Hill. A luxury pad that owes more to his wife Rachael’s unhumble beginnings, as the daughter of aristocracy, than his own career climb. Their children Toby and Catherine are blue-bloods that nurse more liberal values than their parents. Catherine, for instance, doesn’t understand why someone who has made money wants to make more. Her cynical outlook on greed is hardly Orwellian though: she will challenge her father’s friends on avarice from their holiday home in France. Toby is less resistant than his sister, although his views on homosexuality and marriage are progressive. 

The other character that makes up the household is Nick Guest. 

Nick is a guest in the Fedden nuclear unit. A friend of Toby’s from Oxbridge, he turns out to be the guest that never leaves. Although Nick stays with the family over the course of the book – the four-year span of Thatcher’s second term – the term guest still seems applicable to him. He remains an outsider in their world because he is never their equal. The son of an antique dealer, Nick comes from wealth, not riches. Also as a homosexual he is considered tainted, regardless of the Feddens tacit acceptance. On grounds of class and sexual predilection, Nick can never be a Fedden and is destined to remain a Guest.

Beauty's Nick Guest.

The role of guest affords you privileges that being part of the family cannot. It allows you to be a neutral observer, to see things for what they are, rather than what they ought to be. Consequently, you spot things that a family might miss: the furtive glances of husband and secretary; the stolen conversation between mother and brother; the disquieting behaviour of the daughter. Nick Guest sees all of this, making him just like Carraway: ‘privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.’ On the swimming pool surface of the Feddens glittering lives everything appears beautiful, but underneath noxious secrets threaten to rise and contaminate the water. Beginning the decade united, ending the decade divided, the families fortune follows the same downward curve of the Conservative Party they represent.

I should end by remarking on Hollinghurst’s prose. His character Nick Guest is a postgraduate involved in the study of Henry James, a novelist regarded in the literary cannon as ‘the master.’ Throughout the novel, Guest is referred to as an ‘aesthete’ because of his appreciation and sensitivity to beauty. Hollinghurst is the same as Guest: he is more interested in art than commerce. His book is a satire on greed, an avowal to artistic endeavour. Sentences like: “Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening” and ‘they toasted them sardonically in milk and sugar’ show a true master at work. 

Essentially, in making a Gatsby for the modern age, Hollinghurst achieves a greatness akin to his inspiration. It really is a great read.

The Line Of Beauty won the 2004 Booker Prize and is available from all good bookshops.