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Alan HollinghurstAlan Hollinghurst
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995.
His acclaimed first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of London gay life in the early 1980s through the story of a young aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich, whose life he saves. It was followed by The Folding Star in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). The narrator, Edward Manners, develops an obsessive passion for his pupil, a 17-year-old Flemish boy, in a story that was compared by many critics to Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice.
Spell (1998), a gay comedy of manners which interweaves the complex relationships between 40-something architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover Justin, and Justin's ex, timid civil servant Alex, who falls in love with Robin's son Danny. The action moves between the English countryside and London where Danny introduces Alex to ecstasy and the club scene.
Alan Hollinghurst's translation of Racine's play Bajazet was first performed in 1990. His most recent novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a decade of change and tragedy and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. It was adapted for BBC Television by Andrew Davies in 2006.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Poetry, Translation
Bibliography
Confidential Chats with Boys Sycamore Press, 1982
The Swimming-Pool Library Chatto & Windus, 1988
Bajazet (translator) Chatto & Windus, 1991
The Folding Star Chatto & Windus, 1994
New Writing 4 (editor with A. S. Byatt) Vintage, 1995
The Spell Chatto & Windus, 1998
Three Novels/Ronald Firbank (editor) Penguin, 2000
A. E. Housman: Poems Selected by Alan Hollinghurst (editor) Faber and Faber, 2001
The Line of Beauty Picador, 2004
Prizes and awards
1989 Somerset Maugham Award The Swimming-Pool Library
1994 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Folding Star
1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) The Folding Star
2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction The Line of Beauty
2004 Whitbread Novel Award (shortlist) The Line of Beauty
2005 British Book Awards Author of the Year (shortlist)
2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) The Line of Beauty
Critical Perspective
Alan Hollinghurst was one of Granta magazine’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 1993, and worked on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982-95. As one might therefore expect, his writing is clever and highly literary. It is also seductive: his three novels so far each have a kind of dark allure, elegance and erudition, passages of dream-like beauty. Alongside all this lies sexual explicitness in depicting gay men’s lives: art and sex are the consuming passions in a realm ‘where happiness can depend upon the glance of a stranger, caught and returned'. Hollinghurst’s fiction casts a spell with its atmospheres of decadence, and always alludes knowingly to its forbears Wilde, Proust, and Ronald Firbank (the latter provides the presiding epigraph for The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and appears within it as a minor character). The novels each have in common a pursuit-of-the-love-object theme, for which the models are Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. They offer readers, of whatever orientation, insights into the contemporary gay world, but these are set against a wider backdrop of art in all its forms, and obsession – in all its manifestations – with many amusing apercus.
The Swimming-Pool Library was hailed as ‘the best book about gay life yet written by an English author’ (Edmund White). It takes place in London during 1983, ‘the last summer of its kind there ever was to be’, and in retrospect constitutes an extended elegy to a pre-AIDS era of reckless sex. The enticing panorama of metropolitan gay life is spread out for the characters, whether they live off inherited wealth like its narrator, or work in its pubs, clubs and restaurants. Disease and death are far from the mind of young connoisseur William Beckwith, who is initially conscious only of ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem…it was my time, my belle epoque’. Beckwith’s hedonistic lifestyle revolves around daily exercise-and-gossiping visits to the Corinthian Club, ‘a gloomy underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality’. A critical chance meeting takes place in another kind of gay locale, the public toilet, when Beckwith saves the life of the elderly collapsed Lord Nantwich; a friendship develops with this avuncular survivor of an earlier, more furtive era in gay life. The peer asks Beckwith to write his biography, and the materials teasingly given out by him piece together the ‘crazed mosaic’ of his life, as a Colonial administrator in the Sudan during the 1920s who later served time in prison for homosexual offences. They also start to reveal some sinister home truths about Beckwith’s own grandfather, a former Director of Public Prosecutions. These gradual revelations are counter-pointed by Beckwith’s own current affairs: platonic with his Oxford friend James, frenetically sexual with Arthur, a young black man, and other working-class gays. The novel beautifully balances an air of mystery with a rich portrait of past homosexual history – from the romantic 1920s to the promiscuous 1970s-80s.
The Folding Star (1994), short-listed for the Booker Prize, is a lengthy and hypnotic novel, an even more exquisite mix of eros and aesthetics. Edward Manners, a disaffected Englishman in Belgium, develops an idealised infatuation with his seventeen year old private pupil Luc (echoing but also parodying Aschenbach in Death in Venice), desire being inflated by continual frustration and pushed to absurdly funny lengths when the boy later goes on the run. Manners is also helping to prepare a definitive catalogue of paintings by Edgard Orst, a Symbolist artist of the 1890s with a tortured love life who, he later finds out, came to a squalid end many years later during the wartime occupation. Orst’s fin de sičcle ‘twilight world’, his pursuit of his muse, a beautiful English actress, to her death, begins to infiltrate Manners’ own increasingly desperate feelings for Luc. Despite the explicit sex, and some very funny episodes, much of the novel has the heightened unreality of a dream, and Manners’ dual romantic compulsions give rise in his own mind to an unlikely Belgium as ‘a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures’. Through his urgent explorations of local gay bars, the bodies of casual lovers encountered there, revelations proceed apace about all the characters, their motives and past lives. By the end of this ‘Merry Goose Hunt’, Luc is able to be seen more clearly by Manners, and by all those who have invested their fantasies in him.
In The Spell (1998), the scene is a contemporary one of clubbing, dance music, recreational drugs, rent boys – and affluent gay lifestyles. The novel is much shorter and funnier, its imaginative sweep is less wide, and it’s far more of an ensemble piece with no one character or consciousness predominating. Alex, a middle-aged, discreetly gay senior civil servant belatedly encountering the youth culture, is perhaps central but he doesn’t dominate the action. Instead various sub-plots and pairings of characters are interwoven around a central theme of (once again) romantic sexual disillusionment. Most are metropolitan sophisticates in search of the country good life, who drive down from London to the Dorset weekend cottage belonging to Alex’s previous lover Justin and bisexual architect Robin. Drawn out of himself by ‘the mood of sexual jostling that went so oddly with the pastoral’, Alex is turned on by Robin’s son Danny, who supplies him with Ecstasy, introducing him to ‘house’ and ‘techno’ music. Alex starts on a journey of self-discovery, feeling himself ‘released’ by the drugs, allowing himself to indulge romantic illusions about Danny. While dancing at a club, he feels ‘the yes of sex and something bodiless and ideal beyond it – what it might be like to float over a threshold into total acceptance by another man’. That the youthful and unfaithful subject of his fantasy, like Luc in The Folding Star, turns out to be something of a tarnished idol is not entirely the point. Alex’s despairing involvement eventually reconciles him, sadder and wiser, to life. Meanwhile most of the other characters get on with cheerfully pursuing pleasures outside of their long-term relationships. Justin and Robin split up, only to be reconciled on different terms. Justin, who has conveniently inherited an estate, is cynically convinced that ‘money made everything clear’. Indeed, money – its capacity for instant access to pleasure, with ambiguous moral consequences, is a persistent minor theme in the generally well-to-do world of Hollinghurst’s novels. Sex and art are even more pervasive within them: they show beautifully how the sexual and aesthetic instincts are inextricably, if heart-breakingly, entwined.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
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