One gets a sense of the difficulty of life to gay men, a subject that can not be easily explained to an angry society that covets the usual and not the unique.
The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst
Booker prize winning author (The Line of Beauty) Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell is an earlier, and more relaxed book than Beauty. Here Hollinghurst has a really fine sense of gay life in England in the late 1990′s. His protagonists are 4 gay men.
Alex the sensitive of the group is a bit over 40 and has just lost his younger lover, Justin, to Robin a man about his own age who lives in the English country side.
Much of the book takes place in this country side area, as Alex goes to visit his lost lover. Which is a very odd state of things as Alex and Robin are rather opposed to the idea of each other and never seem to see eye to eye. Yet, Alex who appears to be a perennial romantic (wears his heart on the sleeve) is curious about Justin’s new life and Hollinghurst admits the same of Justin, in that he, Justin is unsure if he made a ‘wrong’ choice in leaving Alex.
Robin is described as an attractive man sure in his ways but experiencing a mid-life crisis. He and Justin find the days hard going. Robin’s son Danny is the catalyst for them all, younger and very attractive, he takes a strong interest in Alex and they both become lovers. Robin is silently opposed to his young attractive gay son with Alex, but this never actually comes out in the novel as a fact, as Hollinghurst chooses that ‘Brit’ Stoicism to mirror these characters internally not demonstratively.
The writing here by Mr. Hollinghurst is very distinct and bright. We actually see a gay world here, where the participants, gay men are just under the surface of the other (straight) lives that perculate about them. Close to the end of the book where Alex and Danny are at the beach we do hear through Mr. Hollinghurst the odd sense of those ‘Others’, the constant opposable force of ‘typical humanity’ as it trudges about, making babies and living a blind existence.
The real wonder of the book though is that I was surprised that it is set in the 90′s… in fact Hollinghurst is such a good writer that these men could have been from 1920′s, so firm does he know these men and their ways and lives. One gets a sense of the difficulty of life to gay men, a subject that can not be easily explained to an angry society that covets the usual and not the unique. Clearly the edges of freedom are not what they seem to a majority who really don’t even know their own identity… luckily gay men are just beneath that surface to give a larger meaning and breadth to the fabric we know as life.
Mr. Hollinghurst is one of us, thank goodness, and it’s a wonder that we are privy to his great talents! The Spell is perhaps the best and first book that one should read of Mr. Hollinghurst. Indeed in a hundred or so years we may just see a Hollinghurst Bust amongst Wilde, Capote and Maugham.
