99 problems

Again with the length, Chris. A book in a day is doable, regardless of length (within reason), but even so, 500 pages of literary fiction wasn't on paper the quickest read, even factoring in three hours or so of travelling to get to grips with it. But having been recently recommended it very strongly, the fact I'd been meaning to read it for ages anyway, and finally with it having been chosen for a forthcoming book club, it must have been fate. Or something.

And so my penultimate book of the year was Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. It even has the distinction of being a Booker winner, so that's another one I can tick off on that count too. It was also a very good one and it's certainly much easier to read a book in a day if it's good and you're enjoying it and this definitely succeeded on both counts. Set in the Thatcherite heydays of the 1980s, it has everything you would expect from that decade – money, class, politics, homosexuality, sex, drugs, AIDS, snobbery, prejudice and hypocrisy by the shed load.

For the most part a celebration of the decade, at least as far as most of the characters are concerned, for they live lives apart from the masses. Yet throughout there are portents and shadows of things to come and in the third part of the book, things come crashing down as, to mix my metaphors, the dark underbelly of the decade rears its ugly head. The savagery and hypocrisy with which this happens, the limits to the tolerance shown throughout, the destruction of relationships and friendships, leads one to as whether they were really there or if simply it was convenience or the classic fair-weather friend scenario as the protagonist gets hung out to dry.

Throughout it, the lives of the people involved are woven together with skill and the writing is, like much of the subject matter, at least to the characters and possibly the author, a thing of beauty. The imagery and idea of lines is referenced throughout, but whether these things are natural or artificial (superficial?) varies depending on the observer. A coming of age story, a family affair and definitely a moral tale too, this book superbly captures many facets of a decade much maligned, ruled by greed and strife, and does so with a streak of dark humour throughout.

Book number: 99
Title: The Line of Beauty
Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Category: Books that have been sat on my bookshelf for too long