- Alan Hollinghurst
"I want to make it perfect first time"
Bursting on to the literary scene in 1988 with his debut novel, "The Swimming Pool Library", Alan Hollinghurst was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. It was a wise choice. In 1994 Hollinghurst was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "The Folding Star". This was followed by "The Spell" in 1998 and now, six years on, "The Line of Beauty". This was the starting point in his conversation with Steve Gale. Why such a long gap between books? "I am a very slow worker. I had no idea for another book." Hollinghurst admits with a wry smile. "I plan a novel carefully but the writing process is slow because I want to make it perfect first time. I change very little." "The Line of Beauty" is set in London in 1983, the heyday of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Nick Guest, the gay, cocaine-snorting hero, has just come down from Oxford and writing a thesis on Henry James. Staying with the wealthy Fedden family, he becomes seduced by their privileged lifestyle.
Oxford-educated himself, Hollinghurst's stylised fiction has been compared to Evelyn Waugh and in this novel he is "pre-occupied" - by Henry James, "the patron saint of this book". Gale asks if he could define a particular gay sensibility in writing. After a thoughtful pause, Hollinghurst describes the paradox between concealment and display, it's about ambiguity and style. He likes to explore, like E M Forster, the meritocracy of gay life where there is a fluidity across the class divide.
Alan Hollinghurst speaks as he writes - very slowly, pedantically, precisely. He reads a humourous section from his novel as an actor with pace and clarity. He later reveals that when a book is complete he is totally bereft and depressed, as it has been so much part of his life for a few years. The event was a fascinating insight into the working of a novelist's creative mind. We may have to wait another five years for his next novel, but it will be perfect.
Vivien Devlin, August 2004
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