A Glittering Void

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2004)

...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.

First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.

The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.