Alan Hollinghurst
The media reception of Alan Hollinghurst’s win did The Line of Beauty a great disservice. There was far more to the book than it simply being ‘the first gay novel’ to win the prize.
Previous Booker Prize winners such as William Golding’s Rites of Passage and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road had included sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality, but Hollinghurst’s stylish tale put gayness front and centre.
Although the sex and snorting of its earlier companion piece The Swimming-Pool Library are present and correct, the novel is as much about the febrile atmosphere of the 1980s, with the travails of its hero, Nick Guest, set in the age of Mrs Thatcher, Aids and class privilege.
Winner The Booker Prize 2004
By Sarah Hall
By Colm Tóibín