Much admired for his prose style, and often called Jamesian, it is a sumptuous experience and one anticipates a new book roughly every seven years with some relish. But there can come a time when one thinks one sees through the technique and some of the magic is lost, or it disappears for good.
No Hollinghurst character ever says anything without being given an adverbial clause to qualify precisely how they said it as the author displays his close observation of personality. Ezra Pound would have had a very good time indeed scoring through anything but entirely necessary nouns and reducing the text to half its length. If Ezra pared down to the barest essential, Hollinghurst can hardly bear to have anyone sip a drink without them doing it with a furtive hint of loucheness or as peremptorily as a busy secretary.
They spend their lives in a constant condition of expectation, blushing or usually 'colouring' whenever in the proximity of the object of their desires. It must be exhausting for them.
Through generations of the twentieth century, the original sin of the Sparsholt affair is never quite spelt out although we know it involved corruption and an illicit homosexual liaison in a period when public opinion wasn't quite as laissez-faire as it is now. But for much of the book it is hard to care much about anybody affected by it because they all seem so charged up with the frisson of their own eroticism. I had Alan Hollinghurst close to the top of my list of contemporary novelists in a time that seems to me to now lack a poet of the status of Auden, Larkin, Heaney or Sylvia but isn't badly off for fiction writers. And, yes, of course, Auden gets a mention in passing. But for much of this book he went into reputation freefall, having apparently gone to the same themes once too often and I wondered what I might be bid for the complete works, this one signed. The correct answer to the finest of our fiction writers is surely Julian Barnes whose literariness isn't bound up with chronicling privileged high camp.
However, having flirted outrageously with the perils of being abandoned by me, he somehow saves the day. It is throughout a vivid and enjoyable read and, one eventually has to admit, shot through with several pieces of exceptional prose from the 'thuggish, illusionless head' of the burly opposition at an art auction, through the 'hundred teenage mornings' huddled in a duvet to the aesthetic critique of those whose talk was always 'somehow of having...as if having was their right, and unending'. So perhaps the whole book should be credited with more ironic distance, before the appearance of the dreadful child, Samuel, who tells it as he sees it, who was the first character I liked.
The final section is written in more relaxed cadences, a memorable passage describing a street-cleaning truck in poetic terms,
the swirled pattern started to dry and fade, like a canvas in a dream whose erasure began the moment the brush had made its mark.
The passage of time, the feeling of outsiderliness in a world catering for younger people and an elegiac note of perspective inform an ending that does well to convince after I had spent so long unconvinced. Johnny somehow finds himself a Brazilian boyfriend in the form of Jose, which may or may not refer us to Peter Mandelson but does fit with the theme of gerontophilia. And then it is equally doubtful that the novel ends with a reference to To the Lighthouse, in which a final stroke completes a painting, with a portrait re-done, the paint 'still wet and workable', which even if it doesn't mean Virginia Woolf, certainly does make the whole book come flooding back.
Maybe it is some sort of masterpiece but it may also be too far down the line now for Alan Hollinghurst to prove himself the master of anything beyond this reportage from the revolution in gay lifestyles.
