Alan Hollinghurst at Kings Place

Monday evening I went to a talk by the author Alan Hollinghurst at Kings Place.

It was slightly disappointing in that the interviewer John Mullen (an academic at UCL) did most of the talking, hardly allowing Alan Hollinghurst to speak.  Instead of asking open questions and then waiting for the replies he took the author through an interrogation of closed questions that seemed to relate to his own very specialised technical interests.  Presumably John Mullen belongs to the Lionel Trilling school which holds that literary criticism is a higher branch of literature than mere novels.

When we did hear Alan Hollinghurst speak he talked about the ambivalence of the hero of The Line of Beauty; the tests of loyalty for the reader; the influence of Jane Austen.  He told us he likes to avoid the obvious.  He agreed The Line of Beauty was an historical novel (something that had not occurred to me).

The Line of Beauty is "structured via set piece events" in one of which Margaret Thatcher makes a fictional appearance ("...that was the part I enjoyed writing the most").  Alan Hollinghurst talked about the influence of Henry James on his characters.  He told us "I am not at all interested in creating caricatures".

During the questions one person (female) referred to The Line of Beauty and told the author "I've read it three times and in captures the nineteen-eighties in a way no other does".

In an answer to another question Alan Hollinghurst said the novel "follows the line of beauty rather than the line of duty".

A psychotherapist in the audience said he was "amazed at the understanding of human emotions" in the novel.

As I left the auditorium I heard one young woman say to another "It's made me want to read Henry James".

It has made me want to read Dancing with Dogma by Sir Ian Gilmour.