If you take beauty on loan, what price do you pay? Alan Hollinghurst’s book can tell you

How would Nick Guest, protagonist of The Line of Beauty, react to these developments? He would be crushed and resentful but cover that with elegantly “droll” remarks, and seek the next beautiful man to forget his troubles with. And yet, Nick is no flippant playboy. He is sensitive, he is an ‘aesthete’, alive to the beauty all around him and aching for someone to notice his.

Nick’s appreciation of beauty fetches him proximity to a charmed world. A middle-class Oxford graduate, he is a lodger in the house of the rich and powerful Feddens, in the 1980s, Thatcherite London.

Nick quickly becomes a part of the Feddens’ lives, mainly because he can tell apart an escritoire from a console table, a Paul Gaugin from a Paul Cezanne. His manners are just as cultivated, allowing him to strike the “subtle register of loyal affirmation hedged with allowable irony”, when talking to his hosts.

Nick is useful, Nick is loyal. He is charming and cultured enough to not appear servile while providing service.

In return, he gets access. To their money, to country houses full of beautiful objects, to vacations in France, to other rich and beautiful people. But of course, this beauty is on loan, and there is a price to pay.

To whom does beauty belong?

While the Feddens and their ilk possess beautiful objects, it is Nick who has the eye for beauty. In that sense, he owns beauty more than them. He is more in contact with the beautiful things, inhabiting them and being inhabited by them.

Tellingly, throughout the novel, people keep referring to him as an ‘aesthete’. Aesthete, not connoisseur. Nick has discernment but no purchasing and thus pronouncing power. He is the eternal viewer, never a participant in the game of buying and possessing beauty.

The first section of the book (first of three) gives us Nick’s wide-eyed wonder. He notices the glittering emptiness of the rich, but is still seduced by its glamour. In this world, huge libraries are maintained, where the books, rarely opened, are prized for the “rococo fronds and tendrils” on their cover. Nick is doing a PhD on Henry James, but the aristocratic Rachel Fedden’s family home has played host to him. Just one afternoon in Rachel’s house leaves Nick “tingling to the point of fatigue” with “impressions”.

Another point of beauty for the reader of course is Hollinghurst’s elegant prose, creating comedy of manners’ set piece after set piece, like a skilled miniature artist.

When beauty lies

The second section of the novel takes place three years after the first. By now, Nick is no longer the impressionable innocent. In the first part, he felt “deliciously brainwashed by sex” after his first romp with a man. Now, he is adept at picking up men.

In the Feddens’ world, he is well-established, not yet an insider, but a very savvy outsider.

And he now has a new object to fixate his worship of beauty on: Wani Ouradi, fabulously rich, fabulously beautiful, and fabulously closeted. Nick is besotted with Wani, lets Wani humiliate him, does Wani’s bidding. And yet, even here, his position is that of the eternal viewer. He floats outside the aquarium of the Ouradis’ world, content to not go inside and encounter the sharks.

‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’, Keats wrote. In Thatcherite England, beauty is an illusion, and truth is nowhere to be found.

Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest is both Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, participant and detached narrator, worshipping beauty but refusing to take risks for it.

Grace in a tinpot Eden

At the end, the Feddens’ various bubbling problems explode, and Nick is asked to leave their house.

He has ignored his own sweet, working class parents to sidle up to the Feddens, who now discard him. His first boyfriend Leo, a relic of his days of innocence, is dead of AIDS. Wani, companion of his phase of corrupting experience, is dying. Nick’s AIDS test is due and he has a feeling it will be positive this time.

What is the fatal flaw that has led to Nick’s exile from beauty? First is his desire for no-stakes aestheticism, and the second is his misreading of beauty itself.

Nick does not strive to create beauty in his own world, and does not challenge the ugliness of the Feddens’.

So he falls. But if he is no angel, this is no Eden.

And thus, right at the end, we get a glimpse of the possibility of a higher innocence for Nick. He is learning to spot beauty not in a rarefied, glamourous world, but in the plain “fact of a street corner at all.” Afterall, what is more beautiful than redemption?

See you after 15 days,

Yours Literary,

Yashee

yashee.s@indianexpress.com

P.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.