Focus on how men change and grow
On the surface, this novel is about gay law reform, but it contains far more, writes Nicholas Reid.
Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954, so he is now in his mid-60s. It is well to remember this when you read The Sparsholt
Affair. Like The Line of Beauty, the book that won Hollinghurst the Man Booker prize back in 2004, The
Sparsholt Affair is a long and densely detailed novel. Also like the earlier novel, this one is intimately concerned with gay life and society. But Hollinghurst is older, and there’s now a stronger sense of mortality and the decaying effects of time. Where this novel goes is almost elegiac.
The structure is like a generational saga, with each long section set in the different time period. In 1940, young David Sparsholt appears briefly at Oxford University before going off to fight in the Air Force. Adored by all the (closeted) homosexuals on campus, this muscular athlete is engaged to be married and seems strictly heterosexual. But is he? The first 90 pages of the novel – a full novella in themselves – keep us in a sort of suspense.
Part Two takes us to the early 1960s. David Sparsholt, war hero and engineer, is now married and has a young teenage son, Jonathan or ‘‘Johnny’’ (the pairing of David and Jonathan gives us a big hint). But he seems to be awfully chummy with another married man. Meanwhile, young Johnny is hopelessly in love with a visiting French boy.
On to the 1970s in London, Johnny is openly gay, goes clubbing and has many sexual partners. He’s an aspiring artist and most of his pals are bohemians. But he has a certain notoriety because his father was caught out in a national sex scandal, ‘‘the Sparsholt affair’’, years before. We never hear the exact details of this scandal, but it clearly had to do with gay sex and a dodgy politician. The grown Johnny spends much time ruminating on his father. So we move into the 90s and eventually 2012, when Johnny marries a man. Some of the younger men do things that make Johnny feel old as he reaches the age of 60. He also reassesses family relationships (he now has a daughter, having donated his sperm to a lesbian couple). On its most obvious level, this is a novel about changes in homosexual relationships over the last 80 years.
Pointedly, the ‘‘scandal’’ that ruined David Sparsholt’s life happened just before sexual acts between consenting male adults were decriminalised in Britain, and Hollinghurst is writing on the 50th anniversary of that decriminalisation. But it would be trite to say that this is all that The Sparsholt
Affair is about. The novel is also about how men change and grow and see their parents through adult eyes. It’s about the gawkiness of teenage love and the compromises that are made in life.
Johnny moves from being a bohemian artist to being the wealthy painter of society portraits. And it’s about very delicate personal relationships that are always being renegotiated. Hollinghurst’s strengths as a writer are the detailed precision with which he observes how people speak and act in private life, and his subtle web of imagery. This is a novel for grown-ups who are patient readers.