Fiction: The title of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel is taken from William Hogarth's 1753 work The Aesthetics of Beauty, in which the artist most associated with scenes of London corruption, disease and depravity describes the lines which combine to form the shapes we find beautiful.
It's an odd source for such a delicate notion. And Hollinghurst's use of it to name a novel about Thatcher's 1980s - a period associated with all kinds of ugliness - becomes more of a challenge as his story picks its careful way towards an ending.
Nick Guest is a young gay man just out of Oxford, with a crush on his straight university friend, Toby Fedden, in whose west London family home Nick is a lodger. It's 1983, Margaret Thatcher has had her post-Falklands landslide, and the Feddens are almost instantly recognisable as a family of their time, place and class. Gerald Fedden owns a holiday home in France, a Range Rover and a fedora, and combines a lazy sense of privilege and unthinking general goodwill towards all with the embarrassing buffoonery we would expect from the newly elected Tory MP for the rural constituency of Barwick. His wife, Rachel, is sensible, quiet, cold, concise, and the one with the money. They have an indulged son and a difficult daughter.
It's a world that Hollinghurst evokes effortlessly, and lovingly, and it's the kind of world that readers of his previous novels, most famously The Swimming Pool Library, will find familiar. He does sunny summer evenings in Notting Hill and country estate birthday parties very well. He does the tension and pleasure of lazy days by the pool at the French manoir beautifully. He does the powerful coldness of expensive restaurants and over-designed London apartments perfectly. It's a world of unselfconscious wealth and almost unacknowledged power. Nick Guest moves through it all with a mostly delighted, uncritical gratitude: initially, perhaps, understandable, but quickly becoming frustrating, as you find yourself almost shouting at him to take note of his surname. He is undoubtedly a guest here. He is tolerated and accommodated. From the beginning, there is a certainty that something, eventually, has to give.
In the first and best section of the book, he embarks on an affair with Leo, a slightly older black man with all kinds of links to a world more real than Nick's temporary, borrowed one. Leo has a sexual history, a politically engaged mind, a job, a "dead religious" mother, a bicycle. Their nervous, gentle relationship is described wonderfully well, with humour and affection, and Leo is the most engaging and sympathetic character in the book. Nick's embarrassment about the Feddens when with Leo, and embarrassment about Leo when with the Feddens, is both painfully believable and wryly compelling. But the causes of it - matters of race, class, money, sex and acceptability - are scattered about this book without ever really being picked up and examined.
It seems inevitable that Nick's sexual awakening will lead either to other kinds of awakenings, or to a denial of the larger world. When the book takes a sudden three-year leap forward, and Nick is still living in Kensington and Leo is nowhere to be seen, I couldn't help being hugely disappointed, and taking quite a severe dislike to the "under explained guest".
There is no denying that Hollinghurst writes beautifully. His sentences seem at times sculptural, carved with a care and craft that it's possible to delight in. He can illuminate character with the briefest of glances: usually aristocratic eccentricity or the ugly vulgarity of those whose aspirations are polluted by their wealth. There is a problem though, at the centre of things, and it is the problem of beauty itself. Our beholder is Nick Guest, and his eye is decidedly dodgy. His lover, after Leo, is a man described as physically beautiful, but for whom it's terribly difficult to feel anything but a mild, incredulous revulsion. Their progress through the rest of the book is fuelled by cocaine (one line of beauty after another), competitive, obsessive sex, and a secrecy so complete that no light shines on them until it is too late.
It becomes difficult, after a while, to see the point of it all. The politics, which buzz around the edge of things in the form of predictable scandals and brief glimpses of "The Lady", is never addressed. The art, the "beauty" by which Nick sets so much store, amounts to plenty of reference to Henry James, and the tidy classification of various households by the artwork which hangs on their walls. Love leaves the scene, along with Leo, pretty early on. The arrival of death towards the end is admirably brutal, unflinching and honest. But its effects, its distribution of dignity and significance, seem skewed, leaving me with a sense that someone, either Nick, or Hollinghurst, or I perhaps, had missed the point.
And that becomes the problem. The Line Of Beauty is evasive. In its examination of an elite world, formed by money, justified by beauty, fortified by denial, it treads so lightly, so gingerly, that it covers no real distance at all, and never makes a stand. The strategies of living employed by its protagonists - their desire to keep the world as it best suits them through thought and lack of thought, through their choice of company and of distraction, and through their distant, long-armed judgment of all that they'd rather not know about - seems also to be Hollinghurst's strategy. He holds back. He skips and eludes. And what he does reveal, he also colludes in - the maintenance of a privileged ignorance.
• Keith Ridgway's most recent book, The Parts, is now available in paperback from Faber and Faber