Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty was the first novel in which gay themes were prominent to win the Booker Prize in 2004. Unlike Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker in 2020 for Douglas Stuart with its portrayal of a working class Scottish gay man, The Line of Beauty is a more rarefied piece, portraying the upper echelons of British society. Playlists created to characterise Shuggie Bain feature music from The Jam, Billy Brag and The Dream Academy, while the music of The Line of Beauty, which features prominently in the novel, itself, is used as either a diegetic counterpoint to the drama, or it features in various discussions that pertain to moral or aesthetic values. All of it represents a privileged and consciously cultured class of character. There is no punk or pop music: The Line of Beauty features Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. Even when Catherine Fedden, the rebellious and troubled daughter of MP Gerald Fedden, wants to let loose, she thrashes about the house to Rachmaninov. Her wild dance forms a nice contrast to the cultured event held by her father around the middle of the novel, in which a Russian pianist, Nina Glaserova, performs at the Feddens’ home. Gerald’s primary concern is to impress. As a Member of Parliament he is still operating below the level of public visibility he desires to match his ambitions. And the thing is to be seen. But when Nina Glaserova launches unexpectedly into another series of musical pieces just after everyone thinks she’s finished, it is up to Gerald to mercifully release his guests from the entertainment. It is hilarious that the consensus, afterwards, is that it was the last piece she played that was good.

Outline of the Plot

Gerald Fedden, who has become an MP in the 1983 election lives with his wife Rachel, their son Toby and Catherine, their daughter, at Kensington Park Gardens in Notting Hill. Gerald’s ambition is to become a prominent enough politician to have a [puppet] made of him and move in the upper circles of government. Several times in the novel he schemes to have Margaret Thatcher attend social functions he arranges. Meanwhile, Nick Guest, who went to Oxford with Toby, has come to stay with the Feddens. Nick has scored a First in Literature at Oxford and is beginning a PhD on the style of Henry James. His friendship with Toby is based on their Oxford association, but Nick is also secretly attracted to him. Catherine, who is only nineteen when the novel begins, struggles with depression and is later diagnosed as bi-polar. In the first chapter Nick finds himself having to cancel a first date to look after Catherine. Catherine’s parents and brother are absent and Catherine is having an episode: Nick fears she will cut herself again.

It is a moment that determines the course of the next few years of Nick’s life. He fails to tell Catherine’s parents about the incident, but the Feddens recognise, nevertheless, that Nick will be good to have around to look out for Catherine, thereby surrendering, to a degree, their own responsibility for their daughter. Nick rents a room on the top floor of Kensington Gardens and he essentially becomes a part of the family.

1980s Britain

The Line of Beauty is also the story of Britain in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher, herself, appears in a humorous scene in the novel, while issues like the AIDS crisis percolate beneath the surface for much of it, until the Feddens suddenly receive word that ‘uncle’ Pat has died of the disease. But the signs have been there for some time. Nick’s boyfriend, Leo, in the first part of the novel, introduces Nick to his former partner, Pete, whom Nick thinks looks ill. And because there are gaps in the narrative which are only explained later, we learn that AIDS is a larger issue in the story than we might have expected: that it will determine much of the closing third of the book. And then there is the issue of homosexuality, itself. Hector Maltby, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, is caught with a rent boy and loses his job. Homosexuality had been decriminalised to some degree in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, but it is still a largely taboo subject, and it’s still a stretch for those who see themselves as enlightened to accept. For his own part, the Feddens know Nick is gay and give tacit permission for him to bring a boyfriend home – Rachel refers to Leo as Nick’s “special new friend” – but he nevertheless feels obliged to sneak Leo in. When his parents find out Nick is gay they sell his double bed. His mother can’t even bring herself to openly speak about Nick’s sexuality, but she assures him she, “didn’t care about his being a whatsit one way or the other.”

The novel is a melting pot of ideas from the period that sometimes seem disconnected. It alludes to different aspects of its historical period: attitudes to homosexuality; the AIDS crisis; conservative politics and nationalism in the wake of the Falklands War and England’s ties to the Star Wars program; as well as Christian conservatism, most notably expressed by Mrs Charles, Leo’s mother, who longs for her daughter, Rosemary, to marry, and briefly seems to have her eye on Nick to fulfil that role. There is also the matter of the rise of corporate and personal wealth during the period of the 1980s, which is best characterised by Sir Maurice Tipper whose daughter, Sophie, is engaged to marry Toby. Sir Maurice boasts a fortune of over a ₤150,000,000, but fails to offer Gerald any money for an expensive lunch. His name, ‘Tipper’, is perhaps a clue to his character, as names are for a number of characters in the book. Nick remains a ‘guest’ in the Fedden household, for instance, despite claims he is family. Sir Maurice’s name is likely ironic or it suggests his lack of generosity. When Catherine questions the need of such wealth, Sir Maurice equates wealth with power and disingenuously claims, “The point of having power . . . Is that you can make the world a better place.” But on the subject of homosexuality and AIDS Sir Maurice’s lack of generosity is most apparent when he states, “They had it coming to them.”

The question is, what kind of story is Hollinghurst telling us? What point is he making? For a start, we might easily presume there is a level of satirical intent in the portrayal of Sir Maurice, or of conservativism, itself. There is a moment when Nick, high on coke, proposes a dance with Margaret Thatcher who, somewhat tipsy, herself, accepts. It feels like a scene Hollinghurst can’t resist, inspired, he says, by a picture of Thatcher dancing with conservative politician, Ian Gilmore. That Thatcher should be made to dance with a doped-up homosexual the year before her party would introduce Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which pushed back against gay reforms by banning any material that would conceivably promote or portray homosexuality, seems pointed. But there is not a simple dichotomy drawn between wealth/conservativism and the homosexual community or left wing politics. Another reviewer who is somewhat ambivalent about the book has stated:

A much larger problem for me is that it doesn’t seem to have a purpose; when I’d finished reading this book I didn’t come away with any clear idea as to why Alan Hollinghurst had wanted to write it, let alone what I was supposed to have gained from reading it. It does contain half-hearted nods in a few thematic directions, but none of these is fully developed.

But I think this view holds that the disparate aspects of the plot remain discrete. Yet the novel doesn’t exist to make a definitive point. Its ending is inconclusive. As a bildungsroman novel, Nick has gone on a journey and finds himself socially outcast, but the very tenets upon which he has lived his life seem to have remained unchanged. Nick understands he is gay, but first and foremost, he is an aesthete.

Aesthetic Principles

While his sexuality potentially places him at odds with the mores of 1980s society, as evidenced by the verbal abuse he suffers from the novel’s most conservative and unabashed villains, Nick’s personal disassociation is based upon more aesthetic principles. The title, itself, alludes to Nick as an aesthete. ‘The Line of Beauty’ refers to William Hogarth’s book Analysis of Beauty in which he proposes a double curve as an ideal: the ‘line of beauty’. The line of beauty can therefore not only be demonstrated in the construction of architectural features like arches, for instance, but has a correlation in the human form. Put simply, a curved line is more attractive than a straight line, and the complementary positioning of curved lines forms a line of beauty, known as an ogee.

Nick is an aesthete which is what sets him apart. In the matters of art or sex, Nick is drawn to experiences or other people through aesthetic choices. This does not mean that Nick maintains a privileged position of knowledge over that of other characters in the novel. Remember, the novel is told from his perspective, but it remains a third person narrative. Hollinghurst has allowed room for the character to be separate from the narrative voice. In fact, Nick is prone to superficiality and poor choices as much as anyone else. For instance, on the subject of superficiality, there is a scene in which Lord Kessler takes Nick into his library. Our narrator explains,

. . . the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine grilles of the carved and gilded bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick handled everyday.

It is easy to dismiss this kind of thing as an obvious metaphor: the books represent the superficiality of the rich. And this is certainly the most logical reading of the scene. But Hollinghurst’s narrator does not allow that Nick is any better. Nick admires a particular volume that Kessler shows him,

Bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and guilded with a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature that had triumphed as pure design and pure expense.

Even Nick appreciates the aesthetic achievement of the binding over the book’s substance. It’s a level of superficiality suggested by Nick’s later realisation that, “Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as books that he had read and half-forgotten.”

Later, when Nick receives the first and only edition of a magazine he has produced with his boyfriend, Wani, he admires the cover featuring a,

White Borromini cherub on the right-hand side, its long wing stretching in a double curve on the spine, where its tip touched the wing tip of another cherub in the same position on the back, the two wings forming together an exquisitely graceful ogee.

Again, the magazine is a reiteration of the aesthetic principle. Nick is driven by aesthetic principles and makes judgments based upon them throughout the novel. While reflecting on a trip with Wani, Nick decides, “Wani was rather a philistine”. Wani’s only ‘crime’ to deserve this appellation is that he was less interested in the aesthetic principles and differences between baroque and rococo architecture on their trip. Even so, when Toby asks him the difference between the two style, he is able to offer an explanation of the subtle differences as good as one might give unprepared: “the baroque is more muscular, the rococo lighter and more decorative. And asymmetrical. The rococo is the final deliquescence of the baroque.” Nick may feel a sense of superiority in the matter of aesthetics, but it is not always warranted.

Catherine questions Nick’s propensity to be drawn to people on aesthetic grounds. “People are lovely because we love them, not the other way around,” she says. Challenged in this way, Nick finds he cannot give an intellectual justification for his attraction to aesthetics. His adherence to a ‘line of beauty’ explains his actions, but is not explicable of itself: “He couldn’t unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said.” Yet Catherine’s argument is insightful. Before Nick first meets Leo, he decides his ambition is “to be loved by a handsome black man in his late twenties with a racing bike and a job in local government.” His criteria is so specific, that we suspect his connection with Leo is made primarily, if not entirely, on an aesthetic check list that Leo fulfils, not the least of which is his race.

This is why, I think, it is a mistake merely to place Nick’s homosexuality and aesthetic principles against conservatism and money as the novel’s thematic concerns. Nick aspires to the social world of the Feddens, much like Charles Ryder does in his association with the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited. The rich lifestyle, the holidays in France and the lavish world they inhabit are a stark contrast to his unsophisticated parents, his father’s antique furniture business and his winding of public clocks.

This is part of the significance of music in the novel, also. The ‘harmony’ of music is a metaphor for the harmony of Nick’s relationship with the Feddens, in which, “Even disagreements, for instance over Gerald’s taste for Richard Strauss, had a glow of social harmony to them, of relished licence, and counted almost as agreements transposed into a more exciting key.”

It is a harmony that Nick feels is ever at odds with the harmony he feels when he thinks of Leo: literally the harmony of the ‘love-chord’ Nick seems to hear when he thinks of Leo, which he fears is anathema to Gerald’s principles:

The horrible thought came to him that if it [the love-chord] existed, it had probably been written by Richard Strauss, to illustrate some axe-murder or beheading, some vulgar atrocity. Whereas to Nick, though it was frightening, it was indescribably happy.

Throughout the novel it is those least invested in the aesthetics of art who seem closest to an appreciation of its qualities. So, when Richard invites his guests to hear Nina Glaserova play the piano, most of the guests seem bored because it is the social purpose of the event rather than the music that moves them. Yet Norman Kent, only tolerated at the gathering because he is the father of Penny, Gerald’s Personal Assistant, (Gerald’s mother calls him “a red-hot socialist”) is moved to tears by the music. Nick imagines his response is “defiant sensitivity” and thinks Kent is “making rather a thing of it”. But from Penny’s perspective we see a different possibility as she braves, “this familiar embarrassment”: there is little separating Kent and the feelings evoked by the music.

I think the importance of the aesthetic principles of the novel can be considered through two paintings. The first is ‘The Shadow of Death’ by Holman Hunt. A reproduction of the image is shown to Nick by Leo’s mother, Mrs Charles, when he visits. Mrs Charles is an old fashioned God-fearing woman who believes that all Nick needs to fill the hole in his life is Jesus. Mrs Charles sees Nick looking at the reproduction. For Nick the painting is “doggedly literal and morbidly symbolic”, so that the best he can say about it when questioned by Mrs Charles is, “the detail is amazing – those wood shavings look almost real . . .” For Mrs Charles, however, the painting represents her personal Christian belief, that “the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times.” Mrs Charles is referring to stories like Daniel in the Lions’ Den or Jonah and the whale: stories thought to symbolically anticipate the crucifixion and resurrection. In the painting, the shadow cast by Jesus against the wall of the carpentry shop is another foretelling, and while it is not subtle, it is meaningful to her.

The second painting is Gauguin’s ‘Le Matin aux Champs’, given to Gerald and Rachel as a wedding anniversary present. The painting is small and is passed easily around, allowing each member of the household to enjoy “the spell of sheer physical possession”. After that, it is the question as to the breed of cow represented in the painting which becomes most salient, along with the problem of where to hang it. Gerald has many original paintings by famous artists and making room for it will likely require him to move paintings around, which would reveal shadows on the wallpaper where they have been hanging. Unlike the reproduction owned by Mrs Lamb, the aesthetics of this painting are attached to the status it confers and its value, rather than meaning. Catherine, ever a kind of moral Cassandra in this novel, makes the point: that the painting represents peasants and the hardships and poverty of country life: a subject the Feddens have no connection with.

Conclusion

Hollinghurst’s narrative does not portray Nick as the moral arbiter or the representative of a more progressive ideal in this novel. It is Catherine who more accurately assumes this kind of role, with her staunch insistence on honesty and her refusal to abet her parents’ personal quandaries. Nick, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, detached from real issues, and we suspect that the criticism he draws for his insinuation into the Feddens’ lives is somewhat deserved, even if, at the same time, they have used him in turn.

That the novel might be criticised for being less than subtle is sometimes also justified. Several of the character names read like the cast of a morality play. Nick Guest and Sir Maurice Tipper have already been mentioned. There is also Julius Money, who may finance a short film Nick and Wani wish to make. Then there is Leo, whose name, it is made clear to us, means ‘lion’. Then there is the fact that so many characters have connections to art or furniture. Leo’s former lover, Pete, deals in antique furniture, as does Nick’s father. Gerald owns antique furniture which he invites Nick’s father to view. It feels like a convenient foil for Nick’s character and his aesthetic principles. Even the poor Charles family own “a heavy oak dining table and chairs, with bulbous Jacobean-style legs . . .” Everyone, it seems, owns paintings or furniture to discuss with Nick.

We may quibble at this or decide that we are reading fiction, and fiction is not real even though it has pretensions to realism. Nor do characters have to be good or honourable. While Nick remains a somewhat shallow character, and there are few unnatural aspects of the plot which may jar, they are obscured by what is a well-written and engaging story. I was a young adult in the 1980s and the novel captures a sense of the period: that atavistic longing for a former period you were too young to have experienced – the counter-culture of the sixties and seventies – which was increasingly obscured by the more conservative era of rising corporate influence, conservative politics and conservative social mores that resulted from AIDS. I think in reading the novel you have to consider these broad strokes to appreciate it. Sometimes, what feels like separate issues are really part of the colour and texture of the novel’s broader concerns. Many of the characters may appear shallow, even awful (Gerald’s mother for instance is a terrible racist, and I haven’t even discussed her) but Nick’s story is one of growth and alienation. For some, it will represent what the eighties felt like.