Changing attitudes towards gay men’s lives across two generations of the same family
As a print journalist, your mind can wonder if a lifestyle centred around the written word automatically inducts you into a realm where being published is a possibility worth entertaining, as if all these daily hours at the keyboard are an ideal training ground for a career in prose, when the time is right.
And then, every so often, books like The Sparsholt Affair come along that scupper such thoughts and bring you back down to earth with a thud.
With each turn of the page, fare such as this reminds you that language is an elusive concept, one man’s trusty tools of trade, another’s vortex of meaning, psychology and sensation.
Alan Hollinghurst, of course, is writing aristocracy, and his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, scooped the Booker Prize in 2004, while his 2011 follow-up, The Stranger’s Child, received a long-listing.
The Sparsholt of the title is David, a specimen of a man who causes a stir when he comes to Oxford in 1940 in the manner of a gay Gatsby.
The Blitz is taking place down the road in London. Blackouts are a day-to-day reality and inadvertently provide a shady sanctuary for romance between men (a constant theme of Hollinghurst’s catalogue) at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
The effect that Sparsholt has on campus is only one part of this calmly ambitious work. Hollinghurst moves through two subsequent generations of Sparsholts, with David’s artist son Johnny being the fulcrum on which the saga turns.
Johnny also emerges as being homosexual and is dogged by comparisons to his father, whose influence lingers long in the glacially changing liberty of gay conversation.
In the final stages of The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst lands us in the digital era, with Johnny a man in the winter of his years and the place of the LGBT community radically different to his father’s wartime era.
Hollinghurst’s dialogue is immaculately rendered and often infused with a drawing-room wit that skirts close to a Wilde or a Wodehouse.
Few writers can tap into the very fine sensitivities of momentary human interactions quite like Hollinghurst does, but there is a level deeper that he mines, too.
An alarmingly proficient work that might result in one or two typewriters being chucked in the bin.