A line of beauty
I don't discuss books on here very often, partly because while doing the PhD I felt there'd be more than enough book discussing going on in that, and partly because I no longer get through novels very quickly. But I’ve finally finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and it merits some consideration for obvious reasons.
I first heard of the novel in 2006 when friends were watching the BBC adaptation, but I'm ashamed to say that I'd never made the connection with Hogarth until hearing a conference paper on it last summer and promptly buying a second-hand copy from Amazon. William Hogarth proposed the idea of the 'line of beauty' as the key principle behind natural beauty in his self-portrait of 1745, and developed it in his art theoretical treatise The Analysis of Beauty in 1753. His argument was that beauty was in the serpentine, or curved, line found in nature, and especially the female body, rather than the contorted, mannerist forms that contemporary art connoisseurs lauded in old master painting, or indeed in the lines of a machine.
The presence of these ideas in Hollinghurst's novel is understated but compelling. The actual phrase 'line of beauty' only gets a handful of mentions and is ostensibly the 'ogee' form and name adopted by the main protagonist Nick Guest and his millionaire lover Wani Ouradi for their luxurious new magazine. But more broadly, and as Nick explains to Wani's family, it's 'a sort of animating principle' for the novel as, it seems to me, are Hogarth's works more broadly. The novel is about the coming of age of Nick in the 1980s as a young gay man living in the house of a rapidly-rising rich, Conservative MP, Gerald Fedden. It's about the heady world of Thatcherite success, extraordinary wealth, sex and cocaine in which Nick moves, combined with the growing spectre of AIDS, and his underlying love for his academic study of Henry James (also, incidentally, a favourite of mine).
So, it's partly about a new manner of life and beauty being lived and expounded in the 1980s, just as Hogarth was arguing for a new type of art in the 1750s. But, it's also a commentary on the extravagance and folly of a certain life-style, just as Hogarth's modern moral series were: his tales of corruption in the modern city of a young woman, man, mismatched couple and apprentices in The Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, Marriage-a-la-Mode, and Industry and Idleness. Hollinghurst's tale is eminently cautionary, ending in Nick's downfall after luxury, sexual excess, fame and exposure, just like the rake's.
One phrase really struck me. Towards the middle of the novel, when Nick is in France visiting the Feddens' small chateau, at the centre of a web of lies about his relationship with Wani, he gazes out of the window at the French countryside 'twitching with light, and the shadows baffling, like deep grey gauze.' This appealed me as perfectly describing a Hogarth engraving, where the details in the deeply cross-hatched corners create layer upon layer of meaning. It's in the moral hinted at but left unsaid, the life applauded that's lived to the full, the affection for contemporary folly, that Hollinghurst's tale is one of which Mr Hogarth would have approved.
