Like Hollinghurst’s other protagonists, Will recalls the beginnings of his sexuality at Oxford. In “Our Evening,” Dave Wynn recalls that Don asked him “stuttered, irrelevant conversations about ancient Greece and relationships between boys and older men.” This is reminiscent of Forster’s most explicitly queer novel, Maurice, published the year after his death in 1971, and the Cambridge student-lovers at its center who, like Plato’s Symposium, Learn about homosexuality through the writings of ancient Greece. This is an Oxbridge education, which not only opens the door to sexuality for these young people, but also to the upper echelons of British society. Hollinghurst said“In the social world of public schools, especially when you’re young, there’s a degree of acceptance of these things, but when you’re in the harsh real world, that’s not the case.” In Hollinghurst’s world, schools and universities exists as a kind of playground for sexuality combined with knowledge and hobbies.
his thoughts on beauty
Line of Beauty follows Nick Guest, who lives with a friend in Oxford, whose father is a Conservative MP. His scholarly focus is on the American immigrant writer Henry James, whose novels inform Hollinghurst’s perspective on the integration of outsiders into the elite and the ensuing social dissonance. Nick is obsessed with his own concept of beauty, which he derives from Hogarth’s theory of the “line of beauty”, a double S-shaped curve representing perfect form, which he uses in art, music, It draws across the male form and blinds it. benefactor’s actions. While discussing James’ novels, Nick notes that characters often call each other beautiful when they are evil. ”
However, Dave Win in Our Evening is a slightly different proposition. Critic Caspar Salmon said of the new novel in an interview with the BBC: “I don’t think this narrator quite matches the classic Hollinghurst perspective. Unapologetically classical and conservative, but animated by a desire to poke at everything. The book. [it] I feel quite dizzy. [but here it’s] Dave is similar to Nick Guest in that he attended Oxford and was in a higher social class than he was in his adolescence, but the key difference is that Dave is not white. Race is a complex theme in all of Hollinghurst’s novels. His white protagonist’s narrative gaze is always directed toward men of color, depicted in fetishistic detail.
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In The Line of Beauty, Nick apologizes to a taxi driver after a particularly mean diner named Barry Groom lashes out at him. “Nick’s mind went to the Caribbean accent, and he felt an instant sentimental allegiance. He felt himself lifting from the Caribbean accent to the Caribbean accent.” With a Cigar Suffocated people gather around the table, Oxonian babble and Barry wine. ” However, Dave in Our Evenings experiences prejudice firsthand, such as observing that one character is of Burmese origin. r It seemed like she was coloring this country with her own unknown beliefs.” Dave has to tread more carefully than Nick into the social classes he has adopted, and is aware of the implicit judgments they make. It’s hard to imagine Dave, for example, having the audacity to ask Margaret Thatcher to boogie at a Conservative Party soirée, as Nick does.
For a while, Nick Guest, like Sally Bowles in Isherwood’s A Farewell to Berlin, finds her hedonistic lifestyle in Berlin slowly being eroded by the rise of Nazism. She is unaware of the impact that political homophobia and the developing AIDS crisis are having on her beautiful being. The epigraph of “The Line of Beauty” states that at the end of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” whether Alice says that she knows “nothing” about Alice in Wonderland is “important” or “unimportant.” ” He quotes the words of the King of Hearts, who is the one who judges the truth, and expresses the weight of his ignorance. Her trial is fast approaching. Like Alice, Nick falls from a state of innocence to a state of experience over the course of four years, from 1983 to 1987.
