This Booker Prize winner (2004) was very intriguing. Most of our group members lived in England in the 1980's, and vividly remembered "how vile the times were": How Thatcherism was gripping the country, how gay men died of AIDS - and got blamed for it by the media, how the rich got richer. In this novel, we only got to see the rich side of things. Nick, the main character, is unconcerned with any of the social unrest, the miners' struggle, unemployment, the protests against Thatcher... in short, the other side of the divide. He has inserted himself into an upper-class family like a parasite, nursing his crush on the son of the family, trying to make himself useful to them in order to enjoy his secret longing as well as the privileged life, which he calculatedly uses for his success. He was strongly disliked by almost all of our group's members. In fact, some people said that there wasn't a single likable character in the entire book.
As a gay man from a bourgeois background, Nick isn't really integrated into his host family however, and the differences between them come to a crashing separation at the end of the book - which we kind of felt would happen from the start. He was for some reminiscent of Jeremy Irons in "Brideshead Revisited", a social climber who is patronised by wealthy people, remaining very distant from them in his feeling and thinking, but never expressing his differing opinions to them. We got to read some wonderfully sharp, inventive, satirical comments on the upper classes through Nick's thoughts. His first boyfriend, Leo, from a working class background, also gets to say some very funny put-downs about his lover's posh affiliations. I particularly enjoyed his snarky imitation of Lady Partridge, the grandmother, who was like a caricature personified. However, some group members felt that the working-class characters of the book, Leo and his family, were very simplistically portrayed and that, for example, Leo's mother's religiosity was written in a cliched way, not allowing the character to come across as multi-faceted and real as the posh counterparts - although we acknowledged that her simple religious fervour was clearly intended to be her way of denying that her son was gay.
We all said that the writing style was utterly brilliant. Hollinghurst writes in such a sophisticated, inventive way. His satire was great - the welly-whanging contest stood out as a highlight. We thought that the class divide was perfectly portrayed, and that it was utterly real for the times that someone like Nick would remain totally unconcerned with anything that was wrong, until it comes crashing down on him. He was the great aesthete of the book, shallowly concerned with beauty, facade, and his own advancement, and disgustingly oblivious to most of the social struggle. We also enjoyed that the perspective of the book stays with Nick, and doesn't switch around characters as so many books seem to do now. We thought that the portrayal of Nick's sexual relations and fantasies was very real, and thus rewarding for some, but others found it overdone, and distasteful - not for being gay, but for being too glaringly detailed.
A brilliant book, describing people and events that were pretty disgusting to us, therefore maybe not too easy to digest, despite the great writing!
By Cordula
No comments:
Post a Comment