Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel defines a decade, as a young man navigates a world of privilege to which he can never truly belong
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious Tory MP, his wife Rachel and their children Toby and Catherine. Innocent of politics and money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens’ world and an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty.
Published in the UK by Picador.
Peter Crowther’s book on the election was already in the shops. It was called Landslide!, and the witty assistant at Dillon’s had arranged the window in a scaled-down version of that natural disaster. The pale-gilt image of the triumphant Prime Minister rushed towards the customer in a gleaming slippage. Nick stopped in the street, and then went in to look at a copy. He had met Peter Crowther once, and heard him described as a hack and also as a ‘mordant analyst’: his faint smile, as he flicked through the pages, concealed his uncertainty as to which account was nearer the truth. There was dearly something hacklike in the speed of publication, only two months after the event; and in the actual writing, of course. The book’s mordancy seemed to be reserved for the efforts of the Opposition. Nick looked carefully at the photographs, but only one of them had Gerald in it: a group picture of ‘The 101 New Tory MPs’, in which he’d been clever enough, or quick enough, to get into the front row. He sat there smiling and staring as if in his own mind it was already the front bench. The smile, the white collar worn with a dark shirt, the floppy breast-pocket handkerchief would surely be famous when the chaps in the rows behind were mere forgotten grins and frowns. Even so, he was mentioned only twice in the text - as a ‘bon viveur’, and as one of the ‘dwindling minority’ of Conservative MPs who had passed, ‘as Gerald Fedden, the new Member for Barwick, so obviously has’, through public school and Oxbridge. Nick left the shop with a shrug; but out in the street he felt delayed pride at this sighting of a person he knew in a published book.
Alan Hollinghurst
© Ulf Andersen/Getty ImagesHe had a blind date at eight that evening, and the hot August day was a shimmer of nerves, with little breezy interludes of lustful dreaming. The date wasn’t totally blind - ‘just very short-sighted’, Catherine Fedden said, when Nick showed her the photograph and the letter. She seemed to like the look of the man, who was called Leo, and who she said was so much her type; but his handwriting made her jumpy. It was both elaborate and impetuous. Catherine had a paperback called Graphology: The Mind in the Hand, which gave her all sorts of warnings about people’s tendencies and repressions (‘Artist or Madman?’ ‘Pet or Brute?’). ‘It’s those enormous ascenders, darling,’ she said: ‘I see a lot of ego.’ They had pursed their lips again over the little square of cheap blue writing paper. ‘You’re sure that doesn’t just mean a very strong sex drive?’ Nick asked. But she seemed to think not. He had been excited, and even rather moved, to get this letter from a stranger; but it was true the text itself raised few expectations. ‘Nick - OK! Ref your letter, am in Personnel (London Borough of Brent). We can meet up, discuss Interests and Ambitions. Say When. Say Where’ - and then the enormous rampant L of Leo going halfway down the page.
Nick had moved into the Feddens’ big white Notting Hill house a few weeks before. His room was up in the roof, still dearly the children’s zone, with its lingering mood of teenage secrets and rebellions. Toby’s orderly den was at the top of the stairs, Nick’s room just along the skylit landing, and Catherine’s at the far end; Nick had no brothers or sisters but he was able to think of himself here as a lost middle child. It was Toby who had brought him here, in earlier vacations, for his London ‘seasons’, long thrilling escapes from his own far less glamorous family; and Toby whose half-dressed presence still haunted the attic passage. Toby himself had never perhaps known why he and Nick were friends, but had amiably accepted the evidence that they were. In these months after Oxford he was rarely there, and Nick had been passed on as a friend to his little sister and to their hospitable parents. He was a friend of the family; and there was something about him they trusted, a gravity, a certain shy polish, something not quite apparent to Nick himself, which had helped the family agree that he should become their lodger. When Gerald had won Barwick, which was Nick’s home constituency, the arrangement was jovially hailed as having the logic of poetry, or fate.
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He had a blind date at eight that evening, and the hot August day was a shimmer of nerves, with little breezy interludes of lustful dreaming
Gerald and Rachel were still in France, and Nick found himself almost resenting their return at the end of the month. The housekeeper came in early each morning, to prepare the day’s meals, and Gerald’s secretary, with sunglasses on top of her head, looked in to deal with the imposing volume of post. The gardener announced himself by the roar of the mower outside an open window. Mr Duke, the handyman (His Grace, as the family called him), was at work on various bits of maintenance. And Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbours. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double drawing room, and up again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak. He saw himself leading someone up them, showing the house to a new friend, to Leo perhaps, as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he’d been brought up with. In the dark polished wood he was partnered by reflections as dim as shadows. He’d taken the chance to explore the whole house, from the wedge-shaped attic cupboards to the basement junk room, a dim museum in itself, referred to by Gerald as the trou de gloire. Above the drawing room fireplace there was a painting by Guardi, a capriccio of Venice in a gilt rococo frame; on the facing wall were two large gilt-framed mirrors. Like his hero Henry James, Nick felt that he could ‘stand a great deal of gilt’.
Winner The Booker Prize 2004
