William Hogarth's Line of Beauty is a painterly ripple, a double-curved serpent that, oiled or etched on a flat surface, flexes before the eye and breaks free of its medium. In the torso of a Venus, or in the struggling arms of Laocoon, the serpentine line is the movement of nature: more attractive than the straight angle, yet subtle, inscrutable and evocative of a simple yet elusive secret. For this reason, perhaps, it also serves as the title of Alan Hollinghurst's fourth novel; not only a keenly observed and delightfully brutal satire of polite British society during the 1980s, but also an extensive meditation on the manifold connections between beauty, sexuality and love.

The Line of Beauty follows on chronologically from Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, which is set against the blissful pre-Aids promiscuity of the summer of 1983; 'the last summer of its kind.' The Line of Beauty begins in June 1983 and looks forward over four years of Aids and the entrenchment of Thatcherism. Nick Guest comes down to London from Oxford as a guest of his college friend Toby Fedden and his father Gerald. Gerald Fedden is a Tory high-flyer, a 'bon viveur' with an expensive house in Kensington and a largely ignored constituency in the home counties. Nick fits in well with his adopted family, generally keeping an eye on the place and looking after their daughter Catherine, . Conveniently installed, Nick is able to distract himself from his unfruitful lusting after the Fedden's eldest - Toby being equally breathtaking and straight - and get stuck into London's thriving gay scene.

Nick's new found sexual freedom soon becomes strangely at odds with his rise in society. Like his mandarin intellectual sensibilities; Chopin, antiques and Henry James, his open homosexuality is accepted as a form of mild eccentricity by the comparatively well-adjusted Feddens, so long as it is kept out of sight. When arse becomes a class issue, however, and Nick becomes involved with the son of a retail magnate connected to the Conservative party, he finds himself wilfully toeing the line of secrecy, becoming complicit himself in the elision of homosexuality.

Hollinghurst dealt with many of these themes in his first novel, yet where The Swimming-Pool Library is a first-person narrative set strictly within the bounds of a male gay sphere of gymnasiums and non-existent women, The Line of Beauty is engaged with the wider social and political world. It's form reflects this; the novel's action is narrated in the third person, but entirely from the perspective of Nick. In a nod to both Hogarth and the other Master whose ghost lurks manifestly in the wings of this book, Henry James, this technique gives the action a particularly dramatic dimension; a sense of 'world as theatre', evident in this scene where the long awaited Mrs T. makes her entrance into the Fedden household.

Nick followed through onto the landing...He was pressed against the banister at the first turn of the stair, smiling down like an eye-catching unnamed attendant in a history painting...The Mordant Analyst scurried in, almost tripped. amid laughs and tuts. Gerald was already in the street, in humble alignment with the Special Branch boys. Rachel stood just inside, haloed by the drizzly light and the diaphanous silver sheath of her dress. The well known voice was heard...and then there she was.

Such scenic devices are frequent in the novel; often the reader finds Nick in the window seat, or at a distance from the centre of events, allowing the reader to appreciate the social foibles he observes, raising the satire to an almost visual level and removing the need for Nick to comment directly upon it. This formal device is also at work in more subtle ways. In an early and splendidly self-referential scene, Nick, under the guise of explaining his postgraduate research project to Lord Kessler, refers to literary style at the turn of the century - that of Conrad and James - as something which 'hides things and reveals things at the same time.'� Indeed this can also be said of Hollinghurst, for his style, frames and reveals the world from Nick's liminal (in the sense of crossing boundaries) position in the sexual and social world. Understanding this, Hollinghurst's frequent use of mirrors and windows as technical devices to frame groups of characters becomes more than just a clever reference to Nick's aesthetic mindset: it becomes a way of writing the difference:

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions.

Conventional novels tend to give sexual acts special significance, usually reverting to flowery euphemism or transcendental poetics. Readers of his previous work will know that Hollinghurst does not. The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988, became notorious for its graphic descriptions of physical gay sex. A number of reasons lie behind this, over and above a mere intention to shock; firstly it showed gay sex 'like it is,' sex as part and parcel of gay life and not some mysterious practice that 'mainstream' society could ignore; secondly, and linked to this, because it reflected the need, in the face of the spread of Aids, to be honest and make the act itself explicit (it is significant that in both novels it is deception, not sex, that is linked to Aids). It is interesting that in The Line of Beauty Hollinghurst has toned down the descriptions of 'bumshoving,' the act itself never described directly.

This draws the reader's attention back to the language itself, which, in the heat of sexual excitement often descends from the high-flown floridness of James, to the quick-burning, emotionally masculine, almost brutal: 'Wani felt his crotch and Nick felt his arse.'� Such expressions might seem banal if taken in isolation, but balanced against the florid suppleness of such sentences as '..heedlessly obstructive in their own slow walk, which unfurled down the hill to the faint silky ticking of Leo's bicycle wheels,'� it becomes clear that Hollinghurst is bringing together high and low forms of language, allowing his diction to become infected by the sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical passions it describes.

Complex, erudite, often hilarious ('after this Gerald leapt up to the mike as if seizing the controls of a bus from a drunk'�) The Line of Beauty, despite its somewhat arch, dry tone does not allow the reader to forget that at its heart is a tragic story of longing and loss. Unlike the short clear rush of those straight white lines, the snorting of which become a permanent fixture in the latter stages of the novel, Nick fails to unravel the potential of the mysterious serpent. He tries and fails to 'unwind the line of Beauty,'� for Catherine Fedden, the nearest thing to a confidante he has, yet the serpentine line which appears in the form of a grand piano, the shape of a bottom, is something that defies description, yet 'explains almost everything,'� (like in a Hogarth engraving, once you've seen it, it's everywhere). The parabola of his own sexual development, a sense of flexing, of freedom, perhaps the glimpse of an alternative way of life outside the covert strictures and hypocrisy of eighties society; whatever the line signifies, it remains present, yet elusive.


The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Picador.

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