Will, like Hollinghurst’s other protagonists, recalls his sexuality burgeoning at Oxford. In Our Evenings, Dave Win recalls hearing from dons in their “stammering irrelevant way about Ancient Greece and relations between boys and older men”. It is reminiscent of Forster’s most obviously queer novel, Maurice, published a year after his death in 1971, in which the Cambridge student lovers at its centre learn of same-sex love through Ancient Greek writings such as Plato’s Symposium. It is an Oxbridge education which opens the door of these young men to sexuality as well as to the upper echelons of British society. Hollinghurst has said, “With the social world of public school types, these things are sort of accepted, particularly when you’re young, and in a way that they’re not when you’re out in the rough-and-tumble real world.” School and university exist in Hollinghurst’s world as a sort of playground of sexuality that becomes married to knowledge and taste.
His reflections on beauty
The Line of Beauty follows Nick Guest as he housesits for an Oxford friend whose father is a Conservative MP. His academic focus is on US émigré author Henry James, whose novels inform Hollinghurst’s perspective of outsiders becoming integrated into the elite, and the ensuing social dissonance. Nick is obsessed with his concept of beauty – derived from Hogarth’s theory about the “line of beauty”, a double, S-shaped curve representing the perfect form – which he draws across art, music, and the male form, rendering him blind to the behaviours of benefactors. Discussing James’s novels, Nick observes that characters often call each other beautiful when they are being wicked: “In the later books, you know, they do it more and more, when actually they’re more and more ugly – in a moral sense.”
Dave Win in Our Evenings is a slightly different proposition however. Talking to the about the new novel, critic Caspar Salmon observes, “I don’t think this narrator completely meshes with the classic Hollinghurst viewpoint, which is apologetically classical and conservative, but animated by a desire to prod at everything. In the earlier books [it] is quite giddy, [but here it’s] more melancholy.” Dave is similar to Nick Guest in having been to Oxford and found himself in a higher class than that of his adolescence, but the crucial distinction is that Dave is not white. Race has been a complex theme in all of Hollinghurst’s novels, with his white protagonists’ narratorial gaze constantly falling upon men of colour described with fetishistic detail.
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In The Line of Beauty, Nick apologises to a cab driver after a particularly nasty dinner guest called Barry Groom is abusive to him: “Nick’s heart went out to the Caribbean accent, in instant sentimental allegiance – he felt himself float out towards it from the cigar-choked huddle at the table, the Oxonian burble and Barry’s wine.” However, Dave in Our Evenings experiences prejudice directly, with one character observing that he is from Burma, “and the hint of a guttural r seemed to colour the country with her own unknown assumptions about it”. Dave needs to tread more carefully in his adopted social class than Nick does, aware of the unspoken judgements they pass. It is hard to imagine Dave, for example, having the boldness to ask Margaret Thatcher for a boogie at a Tory soirée, as Nick does.
Like Sally Bowles slowly feeling her hedonistic lifestyle in Berlin being encroached upon by the rise of Nazism in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, Nick Guest is for a while blind to the impact of political homophobia and the developing Aids crisis on his beautiful existence. The epigraph for The Line of Beauty captures the weight of his ignorance, quoting the King of Hearts at the end of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland deciding whether it is “important” or “unimportant” that Alice says she knows “nothing” of the business at hand in her trial. Like Alice, Nick falls down the rabbit hole from innocence to experience, in the space of four years, from 1983 to 1987.
