Like London buses, I go months without a five star book and then three come along at once. (The other two being "The Other Side of You" and "Felicia's Journey"). This brilliant novel is witty, poignant, intelligent but very accessible. Narrated in both the first, second and third person by an elderly Paul looking back to the time when he was nineteen and a relationship that would define his life for ever. A woman not ten, not twenty but nearly thirty years his senior. The time: 50 years ago "when you could drive into London and park almost anywhere".
The book is crammed with wonderful comments on the human condition: "Nowadays , at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are". Nearly every page has something similar. Towards the end: "Safety has nothing to do with love". Like Julian Barnes' Booker prizewinning "The Sense of an Ending", it is about memory and how often snatches from the past invade our brains to haunt us from time to time. They sometimes crash in uninvited on our everyday lives. Maybe like Paul and the author, you have to be "at the other end of life".
Before I picked up this perfect copy at a second hand bookshop for £1.50, I should have remembered my previous reviews of Alan Hollinghursts novels. For The Line of Beauty I wrote " If it were not for Hollinghurst's prose, I would have given up" and for The Stranger's Child "I should have known after struggling through Alan Hollinghurst's prizewinning The Line Of Beauty that this book would follow a similar format. Full of his trademark set pieces (dinner parties again) and very little plot.
And here we go again. If it were not for the enjoyable first of the five parts, I would have never persevered. The beginning is set around Oxford University in 1940 and we meet some of the characters whose lives are visited throughout this long book. This is the only part written in the first person as our narrator Freddie Green meets David Sparsholt for the first time. Freddie's embarrassment at one point in the story I found deeply effecting at the time. "Even now I feel the reproving force of those words. She blurted them out, but they had a considered ring, a fatal formula she might have rehearsed many times and which, if so, represented in one stiff phrase a very deep disgust".
This is typical of the great prose from this intelligent writer. However, the emotion of this moment is never repeated. The rest of the book I found boring, repetitive and stale with hardly any plot. The final part incudes an independent short story only knowing one character from the past. I have to admit I did skip some passages and was glad when I came to the end.
This was an interesting story told through the eyes of Alan, a naïve seventeen year old. He has a fixation about his troublesome parents, his wanting them to be more loving to each other, and to him, is almost debilitating. His father's constant critical one liners are met with his own. "He pointed his finger at the wrecked loaf. It wasn't the bread he wanted them to look at; it was everything that was being torn apart". And all told through the third person and from a mature female author.
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