Alan Hollinghurst is known to write his novels extremely slowly. It takes time for him to wield the acutely British magnifying glass that is cast over his characters – that trenchantly mordant view of his often-insular protagonists. It is easy to say that his subjects do not change all too much; he once admitted to having tried writing a novel with no gay characters in it, and failed.
He writes with a limpid touch and subtle irony that perfectly fits the later 20th-century scenes of British life he dissects. There is often a peculiarly reticent sense to his narrators, even in a novel as long as his latest, Our Evenings . Hollinghurst’s familiar voice and subjects allow us to see what he is doing in each novel within those parameters, to read the nuances and intentions behind his prose.
In The Line of Beauty , that is what he does most brilliantly, illustrating a connecting thread that ties together the novel’s biggest ideas. It is that thread which is held rather more tenuously in Our Evenings . The pop culture milestones that helped shape LGBTQ+ history Top 5 queer love stories, chosen by Justin Myers aka The Guyliner The subject is the life of David Win, taken from his childhood up to his death.
David is half-Burmese, his father a mysterious figure about whom we hear precious little. The mystery of his background is one of the beads in that connecting thread, another being that of the family who funded his public-school scholarship, the Hadlows. Having been bullied by.