BRITAIN: Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, the year's outstanding big literary novel, carried off the £50,000 Man Booker prize last night in the face of strong opposition from rivals and acute disappointment, writes John Ezard in London
His cuttingly fastidious view of gay lusts and ambition in Margaret Thatcher's Britain beat five other novels, including the favourite, David Mitchell's highly touted and already high-selling Cloud Atlas.
Mitchell's imaginative tour of the world and the centuries was evens favourite with Ladbroke's and 5:4 with William Hill.
Hollinghurst's book was the first gay novel to win the Booker in its 35 years. The chairman of judges, the former British arts minister Mr Chris Smith, said: "This was an incredibly difficult and close decision. It has resulted in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite 1980s. The search for love, sex and beauty, is rarely so exquisitely done."
The result was a split vote, with Hollinghurst, Mitchell and Colm Tóibín's The Master, a fictional portrait of the author Henry James, "all very close".
The Line of Beauty is a sumptuously written parable of the well-upholstered rise, decline and disgraceful fall of Nick Guest, an Oxford postgraduate who is a proud, detached connoisseur of literature, music and style.
He delightedly accepts an invitation to stay in the London mansion of the super-rich Feddens, motivated by his secret love for their son. The father, Gerald Fedden, is an almost effortlessly enriched junior minister, elected in the landslide years of Thatcherism.
In his personal life, Nick graduates from a black working class lover to the millionaire son of a Thatcher-ennobled Lebanese supermarket magnate.
Nick is writing his thesis on the author Henry James, and references to James' novels fill his thoughts and stud the book. The final, foreboding two pages are among the most finely wrought endings in modern fiction.
Mr Martin Higgs, editor of the UK bookshop chain Waterstone's magazine, said last night the book was "a sophisticated social comedy". - (Guardian Service)