Books
Alan Hollinghurst's "Line of Beauty" wins Booker

By Beth Gardiner
The Associated Press

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Book review: Growing up among greed, vanity and drugs in '80s London Other links Search event listings

Hollinghurst beat out five other finalists to win the $90,000 Man Booker Prize.

"It's very amazing to me that the long, solitary process of writing a novel should lead to a moment like this," Hollinghurst said in accepting the award.

The book, set in the 1980s, tells the story of Nick Guest, a gay 20-year-old Oxford graduate who takes a room in the home of an ambitious Conservative politician and his wealthy family.

As the novel unfolds, Nick explores a world of cocaine, gay cruising and the self-confidence of wealth, set against a background of social problems, including AIDS.

The book, Hollinghurst's fourth, explores an era shaped by Thatcher's hard-driving, free-market ethos.

"It was such a ghastly period to live through," Hollinghurst told the British Broadcasting Corp., which carried the awards ceremony. "We're very much living with the consequences of what happened in the Thatcher years now."

The 50-year-old author lives in London and often writes on gay themes.

"Hollinghurst proves to be one of the sharpest observers of privileged social groupings since Anthony Powell," The Guardian newspaper said in a review, referring to the acclaimed and prolific British novelist.

"The novel has sufficient breadth to evoke the full social spectrum of 1980s Britain - gay and straight, rich and poor," the newspaper said.

The Washington Post enthused that "One can't get enough of Hollinghurst's sentences."
 
"As the novel progresses, we start to see more and more cracks in the teacup, in this showy world; corruption spreads and stains," the review said.

The prize is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.

Once known just as the Booker Prize, the award was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it two years ago.

This year's six-book shortlist had prompted some criticism for its exclusion of literary heavyweights like V.S. Naipaul and Muriel Spark.

Chris Smith, the Labour Party lawmaker who headed the judging panel, praised the short-listed novels when they were revealed, but said he hadn't been impressed by the year's output.

"Of the books submitted, I have to say quite a number were not very good," he said.

The other works considered were Achmat Dangor's "Bitter Fruit," about festering psychic wounds in post-apartheid South Africa; Sarah Hall's "The Electric Michelangelo," set in the seedy world of seaside resorts and tattoo parlors in Britain and America; Colm Toibin's "The Master," about the novelist Henry James; and Gerard Woodward's "I'll Go To Bed At Noon," about a family wrecked by alcoholism.

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," an intricately structured book that weaves together six stories told by different narrators, had been considered the favorite, but the Man Booker is often unpredictable.

Hollinghurst, born in Gloucestershire, western England, studied at Oxford, served as deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement and was named one of Britain's Best Young Novelists by the journal Granta in 1993.

His first novel, "The Swimming Pool Library" (1988) was selected as the 34th greatest gay and lesbian novel of all time by judges for the Publishing Triangle in 1999.

His other novels were "The Folding Star," in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker, and "The Spell" in 1998.

Last year's winner was D.B.C. Pierre's "Vernon God Little," a darkly comic novel written in the voice of a teenager who is falsely accused of a Texas school shooting. Pierre is the pen name for Australian Peter Finlay.

This year's judging panel included novelist Tibor Fischer, writer and academic Robert Macfarlane, Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling.

"The Line of Beauty" is published by Picador.