It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take a lot for a single loose thread to become detached from the network.
This novel was at the heart of a modest literary brannigan when it won the 2004 Booker Prize in a year when David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was tipped, and expected, to win. Instead, this book took home the prize. At the time it was labeled as ‘the great gay novel’ – a label that isn’t wrong, per sé, but also lacks nuance. It is as much about class as it is about sexuality. When push comes to shove, Nick will always be a guest – it’s quite literally who he is. We all know Nick’s position is perilously uncertain. Nick knows it too. Nick’s homosexuality is a complicating factor; though Toby and his sister Catherine are aware of it and superficially supportive, Gerald and his wife Rachel give no indication that they know about it.
There is a great contrast between the upper-class world of the Feddens and the seedier gay subculture of the 1980s, with the inevitable AIDS epidemic and Thatcherite yuppy greed in the background. At the start of the novel, Nick has a fling with a council worker named Leo. Because inviting Leo into the Feddens’ home is unthinkable and because Leo lives with his deeply religious mother, they enjoy their trysts in parks and gardens. Three years later, we see Nick take his lover Wani – the son of a crass and very wealthy Tunisian supermarket magnate – to the Hampstead Heath men’s swimming pond, well versed in the city’s queer world. Around them, men wither and die.
Meanwhile, the Feddens and their extended social circle envelop themselves in giddy avarice mixed with an almost erotic desire to be near Margaret Thatcher – often referred to as ‘the lady’ – as they grapple for her to host her at their dinner parties, soirées and holiday homes. When Thatcher eventually does put in an appearance, Nick invites her to dance, knowing full well it’ll get his picture in the papers. Hours before, he has gone down to a public lavatory for a risky fuck with a nameless rando. He inhabits two worlds simultaneously and suspects, as we do, that if the two meet, his world will come crashing down. He is afflicted by a sort of callous helplessness, though others point out that he has the charm to make his way in life regardless.
The language in the novel is opaque but beautiful, which befits Nick, who, in anything, looks for beauty first. A man weeps defiantly. A piano recital and dinner is “all chaffing courtesy and furtive ruthlessness.” The language as well as the setting – the upper crust says little yet speaks volumes – can make it a challenging novel to follow, but it’s worth the effort.
I read Cloud Atlas not long after it came out, while The Line of Beauty sat on my shelf for close to twenty years (I bought a very clearly used copy in a second hand shop at some point; I have no idea when I bought it). I’m glad I waited; I was 19 when the book came out, and I would have missed the subtleties and finer points it makes. Is it better than Cloud Atlas? It’s impossible to say, but it is definitely a deserved winner.