Edmund White
THE SPELL by Alan Hollinghurst (Chatto & Windus)
This is a thoroughly English novel in one way and totally exotic in another. What is undeniably English about the writing is the delicate sense of social comedy, the oblique silliness, all insinuation and suspension points, and the zanily camp humour, not to mention the rapturous response to the Dorset countryside and even to a horrid Victorian country house.
What is exotic about the book is the all- male gay cast of characters, involved in casual husband-swapping, as though Alan Hollinghurst had discovered that the mathematical possibilities of coupling in a Feydeau farce could be considerably increased if all the partners were of the same sex. Nothing here is lurid, however, or mechanical. Imagine a male Smiles of a Summer Night and you’ll have some sense of the lyricism of this remarkable novel.
The feelings of Hollinghurst’s characters – Robin, Justin, Alex and Danny – their responses to rejection, to ageing, to the efforts of a rival to be civil, are universal and notated with psychological precision. For instance, Robin, an architect in his 40s, moves a new man, Justin, into the house he’d bought and decorated with a lover who has died. As Hollinghurst writes: “At moments the sense of sacrilege was very strong – but then the point perhaps was that the stranger knew nothing of the man whose place he was taking: he had no obligation towards him. Robin sobbed when he told him of his death, but the loose hug that followed, the wiping of a cheek with a rough thumb, moved in ten seconds into sex …” Here the mix of sex and shame, of desire and mourning, is very subtle, slightly shocking – and convincingly true.
The Spell zigzags back and forth between London and the village with all the moral and topological precision of a Jane Austen novel. London is the scene of late-night clubbing, sexual experiments with strangers and the chemical liberation offered by a tab of ecstasy, whereas the village is a place for first one homosexual couple, then another, to dabble with fidelity and to experience the ecstasies of nature as well as the self-consciousness induced by disapproving neighbours.
When Justin takes up residence in the village, he pines for London: “He longed for crowds and the purposeful confusion of the city; he wanted shops where you could get what you wanted, and deafening bars so full of men seeking pleasure and oblivion that you could hardly move through them … ” An all-night rave for gay Londoners in the usually tranquil village is one of the climactic scenes, a brutal enjambement of two distinct worlds.
The style is less concocted than in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star but no less admirable, as though Hollinghurst had decided to abandon counterpoint for a simple accompanied melody. Robin listens to Beethoven during a storm, so loud it becomes “an exciting sabotage of the music”. A would-be rent boy visits the cottage and looks around “with the ambitious interest of someone angling for promotion”.
But Hollinghurst is not just a phrase- maker. He has a gift more crucial to novel-writing, a sense of how to conceal the anatomy of his plot and expose only the living, breathing physiology of the story. He constructs very long scenes that never let our attention waver and that lead convincingly from one emotion to another – our emotions as readers and their emotions as characters.
One scene dovetails with the next, seamlessly, and all come together to produce the accelerating rhythm of life and the intellectual unity of art – that combination Flaubert esteemed above all others and called the progression d’effet. The overall sweep of the story and the polished precision of the language lead the reader to imagine that this book, paradoxically, was written both very quickly and very slowly.
At a time when other gay writers such as David Leavitt and Dale Peck are moving away from exclusively gay content and are hoping to appeal to a wider readership by describing distraught mothers or strange straight couples, Hollinghurst has made the startling decision to populate his new novel uniquely with gay men, relegating heterosexuals to subsidiary roles as alcoholic neighbours or smiling cooks.
His gamble pays off handsomely, since The Spell generates the sparks given off only when a writer takes up entirely new subject matter. There have been coming- out novels and Aids novels before as well as novels about a solitary gay man travelling abroad in search of love or sex, but this book is the first to concentrate on a tribe of lovers, ex- lovers, old friends and new, to bring into close contact the different generations and classes, men who officiate in museums or do conversions of country houses with club clones who work in porno shops or as night guards in office buildings.
Hollinghurst’s real triumph, however, is that he has found so much to admire in lives that are usually dismissed as empty even by other gay men. He has written a hymn to urban sensuality and pastoral love and his sunny landscape is never darkened by a moralistic cloud.
Most gay (and straight) writers today picture sex as an unintegrated explosion of violence, a novelistic strategy well- suited to our period, which is both prurient and puritanical. But Hollinghurst will have none of it. He still sees tenderness in the act of lovemaking and injects glamour into even the most ephemeral encounter. But then again, if gay men’s glasses aren’t rose- coloured, whose will be?