About this title: In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolized at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions. As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, ...
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Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. clean, straight, well bound and unmarked, light wear. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 438 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Acceptable. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"A social satire set in the eighties that takes in class, homosexuality and the morals of the time.
Nick Guest is a working class guest at a tory mps home, through his friendship with there kids. He is also as camp as a row of tents. If you are likely to be offput by details of homosexual extreme behaviour, i would steer clear of this. It starts with him having an affair with a young black fella and moves on to a doomed affair with a married millionaire called Wani.
The MPs family is well drawn. he is married into aristocracy and they have two children, the unhinged catherine who eventually cause the drama by telling the family secrets to a tabloid and Toby, who of course, Nick fancies.
The story moves along at a slow pace. There are comedic touches (nick just talks in platitudes to his higher social class friends) a ton of drugs, AIDs and some nice set pieces, including Nick dancing with the PM (maggie) who looms large over the book, as she indeed did in the 80s.
Some very fine set peices - i really enjoyed the MPs contribtion at the village fete but ultimately, the book was not funny enough to be a comedy, not clear enough to be a satire and not thrilling enough to be a thriller. It was OK, but not what I would call a prizewinner."
"When I first read about this book I was a bit turned off, so was very surprised to find a novel that I liked enormously. It's a social satire/novel of manners, a bit slow at first until you start catching on that the main character says one thing in a given situation but lets you know what he 'really' thinks. He's not the narrator though, but a "center of consciousness" (Henry James style-fittingly since Nick is a recent Oxford grad come to London to work on a doctorate with a dissertation on James). The narrator soon lets you know that all of the characters have their inside and outside views and the book is all about recognizing what's under the surface, not only of the characters themselves, but of the era (The Thatcher years).
It's the story of Nick Guest whose name is significant in a number of ways: first, he's a guest, living while he studies, in the posh (Kensington Park Gardens) house of an MP, the father of an Oxford friend with whom he's secretly been in love for years. Toby, the son, is off on his own and the inhabitants of the house are father Gerald Fedden, MP and rising star in the Thatcher government, Rachel, beautiful wife who's from a very wealthy family-brother is a Lord with a family estate-and Catherine, younger sister of Toby, who's a bit wild and has some psychological and personality problems. Nick's name also recalls two other literary Nicks, those from Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and from F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby-both fascinated by and observers of the upper class. Remember FSF's "the rich are different from you and me". This Nick, though, is not the narrator, but more a Jamesian "centre of consciousness" (a point of view HJ describes in The Art of Fiction as what the writer would see if he could see through the back of the character's head and understand the world from his point of view, but also see the outside world). Turns out to be used very effectively by Hollinghurst.
Nick is homosexual, recognizes it and is "out" in his way, but he's very young and has never had a homosexual relationship. So he writes a letter to a dating service and meets Leo, a lower middle class black of Caribbean descent, older and more experienced than Nick, who lives with his mother (heavily religious) and sister in a small flat in the northern suburbs. Their first sex-neither having a place of their own-happens in the private garden at the Feddens-one of those private gardens in Central London with high iron gates where only the householders have a key.
The novel has some wonderfully drawn characters, even the "Lady" herself (as they call Thatcher). Gerald Fedden's goal in life is to have her visit socially which finally happens when she attends his Silver Wedding Anniversary party. The scene is marvelously done. Gerald is shallow and self-centered, his wife Rachel is beautiful, kind and sort of "dreamy". The daughter Catherine has various unsuitable boyfriends and muddles along, with the help of a psychiatrist-and with Nick as her main ally at home. Then there's Toby, who loves Nick but not sexually, and Wani, an Oxford chum of both who's the son of a super rich Middle Eastern immigrant (one reviewer likened him to Doti Fayed)-gay like Nick and they eventually have a secret affair. They also go into business together, putting out an elegant journal which Nick names Ogee after the curve with Hogarth called, "the line of beauty"--hence the title, though "the line" recalls also the frequent lines of cocaine used increasingly by Nick and Wani and Toby.... The business also plans what Nick imagines as a Merchant-Ivorie-type film of James' novel, the Spoils of Poynton which Nick will adapt to film.
The novel begins in 1983 and is divided in three parts, the other two happening in 1986 and 1987, and the reader gradually comes to realize that this is the crucial beginning of the AIDS epidemic that will devastate the gay community. I didn't put this together at first so it only gradually dawned on me-which is, I think, what the author intended."
"Oh man. I hate this book. I was full of dismay when it appeared, glowing brightly on the updated version of the 1001 books list. I read it a couple of years ago, and it made me froth at the mouth. I figured I'd give it a second chance, maybe discover some of the apparently wonderful humour it's supposed to contain, an extra level of satire I'd somehow missed.
But no. Maybe I just don't get it. There isn't a single character I feel anything but revulsion for in this novel. The way in which it relates the falseness, the decadence, the wastes of the eighties in a warm, almost congratulatory fashion for the majority, makes me want to scream. Is it actually satire? If so I'm clearly a step below the huge array of fawning critics emblazoned across it's pages as far as brains are concerned. The lead character, Nick, is an idiot, the entire tone of the novel is pretentious ("Wani gazed past Nick, into the middle ground of ironic conjecture,"), and maybe that's the whole point. But if it is, I just don't get it.
"21-year-old Nick Guest has graduated from Oxford and is moving in with the Feddens, a wealthy family of London society, whose patriarch is a member of parliament. It is 1983 and Nick is venturing shyly into homosexual forays while avidly pursuing and admiring the glamour of high society.
This book is astounding. From Hollinghurst's complicated spill of sentences, the reader is introduced to the glittering, yet sickly superficial world of the London elite. Nick is at the center of it all, at first as a shy and awkward naif, and then transformed into a preening "don" as he learns to mimic the airs and graces of the wealthy. He fondly believes he is pursuing this "line of beauty" by become one of the elite, but is unaware of the inherent crassness of these people. He is blinded by their charm, their false lustre.
While reading this book, it came upon me suddenly that the pursuit of beauty is an admirable thing, no matter what you believe beauty to be defined as. However, it cannot be denied that beauty cannot and will not return the favor. What you find to be beautiful is generally aloof, cold, and far-and-away. Think of a vista of sweeping mountains, a moving song, even a beautiful person....you're never very warmed by the beauty..in fact it almost provides a cold chill -- it is deeply alluring, yes -- but still heartbreaking in the knowledge that it is unattainable.
This was the message I gleaned from Hollinghurst's wonderful story. And never did I feel preached at...Hollinghurst wrapped his conceptioins in gossamer layers of wit, subtlety and delicious humor. A book worthy of many re-reads and most certainly worthy of the Man Booker Prize."
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