Monday, January 31, 2005
Review - The Line of Beauty
"He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love."
Don't we all? This sentence almost sums up "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst. Its a depressing book of the search for identity of Nick (Nicholas) in the eighties in Great Britain. He is a homosexual and that seems to be the end all and be all of his identity.
Its Britain, perhaps still accepting the existence of homosexuality, but with a pallour cast by Mrs Thatcher, politicos and impending war on Iraq, the book does not move on any level whatsoever. Its almost as though the more people he beds, the more he can establish his identity.
For a brief while there I thought the setting to be socially something like what it is in India today. Nick, with his snorting habbits and yen for a lifestyle of the rich and famous (thanks to the Feddens), gets himself a rich lover and slowly goes deeper and deeper into a miasma of needs and habits. Nearly every companion of his is a closet homosexual and more than once he hates the fact that everything is proverbially under the sheets.
In a setting where AIDS was still a disease and not so much a stigma, the revelations are painful but frivolous nevertheless. The need for societal approval and staking his claim surfaces frequently as the book ends.
Inconclusive ends always put me off and like most things open ended will always have a different interpretations. Here are some more reviews of the book.
Don't we all? This sentence almost sums up "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst. Its a depressing book of the search for identity of Nick (Nicholas) in the eighties in Great Britain. He is a homosexual and that seems to be the end all and be all of his identity.
Its Britain, perhaps still accepting the existence of homosexuality, but with a pallour cast by Mrs Thatcher, politicos and impending war on Iraq, the book does not move on any level whatsoever. Its almost as though the more people he beds, the more he can establish his identity.
For a brief while there I thought the setting to be socially something like what it is in India today. Nick, with his snorting habbits and yen for a lifestyle of the rich and famous (thanks to the Feddens), gets himself a rich lover and slowly goes deeper and deeper into a miasma of needs and habits. Nearly every companion of his is a closet homosexual and more than once he hates the fact that everything is proverbially under the sheets.
In a setting where AIDS was still a disease and not so much a stigma, the revelations are painful but frivolous nevertheless. The need for societal approval and staking his claim surfaces frequently as the book ends.
Inconclusive ends always put me off and like most things open ended will always have a different interpretations. Here are some more reviews of the book.
# posted by Janaki @ 11:48 am 
