![]() ![]() He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. The Line of Beauty is told in the third person, but everything is filtered through a single consciousness, Nick’s: we see things as he sees them, so there is no logistical reason for the novel not to have been in the first person. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. ![]() “No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.” “Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?” ![]() “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. The only child of James Kenneth Holinghurst (a bank manager) and his wife Lilian, he attended Canford School in Dorset. His 2011 novel, The Strangers Child was longlisted for the Man Booker. “After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Alan Hollinghurst is an English novelist and winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. ![]()
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