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A review by sidharthan
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
4.0
I began my Hollighurst journey with the Swimming Pool Library. A good book but there was this sense of excess and something missing at the same time with it. And so I started this much more famous work with some caution. Needless caution I must say, because this book more than lived up to the Booker it won.
There is a beautiful exploration of multiple facets - AIDS and the new acceptance of and age-old prejudice against LGBT+ people; race, status and economical stature; mental health and how it is viewed; and of course the eponymous line of beauty that runs through it all, that perhaps questions the wider aspect of all these enormous things being explored.
All these things come to life through the detailed characters and their myriad interactions that are so real as to feel almost biographical - I was wondering if Alan himself had been in situations that Nick Guest found himself in. And bringing this sense of realism to a work of fiction is without a doubt a great sign of success for a novelist. You feel for these characters. You sense the doom of the relationships that Nick has but you cannot help but root for them. The ending is shocking. Along with the reader, Nick is brought back to reality from the dream he was leading. Most of his life is in his head. He comes to London to live with a love that is entirely imagined. He finds himself in a family that he would be happy to be a part of instead of the family he actually belongs to. Everything to him is a dream - the relationships he has, the drugs that he takes, everything is just balanced in his head and viewing the world as we do through him, we feel the same. There is a beauty in everything that justifies his existence. Who would want to grapple with reality when you could easily perceive a life that mimics perfection? Why would you question anything or go against anything when life is so easy and beautiful? He is of course, forced to deal with these things in the end and we know it is coming but we are still surprised. And his conclusion - his vivid imagination of his own death just felt perfect for his character. His imagined existence was at end, so of course his real one must end too.
Edgar Allan Poe once wrote - "All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream" - and this book epitomises this above everything else. It is beautiful to dream!
There is a beautiful exploration of multiple facets - AIDS and the new acceptance of and age-old prejudice against LGBT+ people; race, status and economical stature; mental health and how it is viewed; and of course the eponymous line of beauty that runs through it all, that perhaps questions the wider aspect of all these enormous things being explored.
All these things come to life through the detailed characters and their myriad interactions that are so real as to feel almost biographical - I was wondering if Alan himself had been in situations that Nick Guest found himself in. And bringing this sense of realism to a work of fiction is without a doubt a great sign of success for a novelist. You feel for these characters. You sense the doom of the relationships that Nick has but you cannot help but root for them. The ending is shocking. Along with the reader, Nick is brought back to reality from the dream he was leading. Most of his life is in his head. He comes to London to live with a love that is entirely imagined. He finds himself in a family that he would be happy to be a part of instead of the family he actually belongs to. Everything to him is a dream - the relationships he has, the drugs that he takes, everything is just balanced in his head and viewing the world as we do through him, we feel the same. There is a beauty in everything that justifies his existence. Who would want to grapple with reality when you could easily perceive a life that mimics perfection? Why would you question anything or go against anything when life is so easy and beautiful? He is of course, forced to deal with these things in the end and we know it is coming but we are still surprised. And his conclusion - his vivid imagination of his own death just felt perfect for his character. His imagined existence was at end, so of course his real one must end too.
Edgar Allan Poe once wrote - "All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream" - and this book epitomises this above everything else. It is beautiful to dream!