I had a discussion with Classic a few weeks ago in the comments section of her review for The Paying Guests, which she said started off very slowly. At the time, I happened to be about 100 pages into Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, and I’d been worrying about how slowly it was moving until I thought back to the same time last year when I read his most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, which didn’t really click for me until the last 50 pages. This sparked an aha! moment for me as I realized that, if I’m already familiar with and enjoy an author’s work, then I tend to give them much more room to develop a story and hook me in.
The Folding Star concerns Edward Manners, an English teacher who shocks his family and friends with a sudden move to a small Belgian city where his only income is to be from tutoring two students. Even before he arrives, he’s convinced that he’s in love with one of the students, 17-year-old Luc, based only on a photograph, and that feeling only intensifies once he’s there and begins some light stalking. His other student’s father is curator of a small museum dedicated to Symbolist painter Edgard Orst, and Edward is drawn into the artist’s work and history when he begins helping to edit the English edition a long-promised catalog.
This is another Hollinghurst that suddenly washed over me very late in the read. Of course it bears his two major trademarks — incredibly urbane prose and graphic, often lurid depictions of gay sex. I’m familiar enough with his work now that I had no problem giving him plenty of space to develop his story, but I’ll admit I was getting more nervous the farther I got, worried that it wasn’t going to come together, that I couldn’t tell what any of it really meant, aside from being a character study of Edward. But when it hit me, much as with Sparsholt last year, I was absolutely floored. I found myself searching my memory of earlier events, even turning back to reread bits from previous sections, trying to find the clues that I had missed.
I’ve found a common thread linking the four of his books I’ve read so far: the overly-confident main character who isn’t nearly as smart or interesting as he thinks he is. In Folding Star, Edward is the first-person narrator who never quite puts everything together himself, but Hollinghurst still finds a way to get everything through to the reader. It’s really rather astonishing. I don’t know how he pulls it off, but I’m glad I stuck with this one. Purely as a story, I don’t know that it holds up quite as well as Sparsholt and certainly not as well as my favorite Hollinghurst, the Booker-prize-winning The Line of Beauty, but as with the others, I’m still thinking about this book weeks after finishing.