Unmerry-
Francis King
THE SPELL by Alan Hollinghurst Chatto, £15.99, pp. 257 The spell which gives its title to this arrestingly self-confident novel is that of addiction: the addiction of some of its major characters to alcohol or drugs, and of all of them to sex.
It is commonly, albeit mistakenly, believed by heterosexuals that all homosex- uals are ravenously promiscuous. A reading of this novel would certainly support this view. Of the quartet of homosexuals at the centre of the book, one, Robin, is an inter- mittently successful architect, and another, Alex, is in the Foreign Service; but so intense is their preoccupation with sex or, at least, so intense is the author's pre- occupation with their sex-lives — that, except in the first chapter, One learns little about the work of either. Indeed, one often wonders how they mange to get any work done at all.
Of the youngest of his characters, Robin's son Danny, the homosexual equiv- alent of a femme fatale, Hollinghurst writes: He was so conditioned to a world in which everyone was gay that he found it hard to bear in mind, down here, a hundred miles from London, that almost everyone wasn't.
Almost all Hollinghurst's characters suf- fer from the same delusion. From time to time their lives either glancingly touch or aggressively collide with those of hetero- sexuals, but in general theirs is a hermetic world which excludes anyone whom they feel to be 'not one of us'. It is as though a universal humanity was of less importance to them than a particular sexual orienta- tion.
Since, despite their constant yearnings for permanent relationships and their feel- ings of despair when such relationships end, sex is so often paramount in the lives of the quartet, it is appropriate that when describing their sexual activities — now finding pleasure in 'a slippery, kicking cock', now in 'a moist arse' — Hollinghurst should do so with such a panting, palpitat- ing, lingering vividness. Equally vivid are his evocations of a gay night-life of random bonking on Hampstead Heath or indiscriminate, drug-induced couplings in rankly overcrowded discos. There is also a masterly section, at once riotously funny and mordantly cruel, in which a flock of London homosexuals swoop down on a Dorset village for a house party, creating actressy drama among themselves and out- raging the locals.
The blurb describes the book 'as a come- dy of sexual manners'; but the comedy is largely confined, albeit in brilliantly mock- ing fashion, to peripheral characters, such as the working-class mother of a village rent-boy, a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking man and wife, or a prissily demure former British Council officer, who are either heterosexuals or closeted homosexuals.
In contrast there is often unease in the scenes of comedy involving those who are neither of these things, since it is in these characters' discomfort or even despair that this comedy has its acrid origins. The giddily accelerating Paul Jones in which the characters, all of them remarkably free of any financial worries, are swept up, swept together and then swept apart, is often so tragic in its final implications that one's response is more likely to be a grimace than a grin.
Robin, the robust and ruthless architect, has Justin, a camp and waspishly witty failed actor, as his lover. Justin was once the lover of bean-pole Alex, the Foreign Office employee. Having been jilted by Justin, Alex takes up with Robin's beautiful son Danny. But Danny soon wearies of Alex — as does Justin, briefly, of Robin. It is a world in which, one feels, all this is cruelly inevitable and tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.
The book appears to end happily, with Alex now in partnership with a sensible, cultivated man older than himself, and Robin and Justin once more united; but, inevitably, one wonders how long it will be before these settled relationships are in turn destroyed by fresh and even more ferocious sexual obsessions.
Hollinghurst is a remarkable stylist, on a par, despite differences of vocabulary and idiom, with such literary dandies of the past as Wilde, Pater and Meredith. The result is that, for many people, the pleasure derived from how he writes may be more intense than that derived from what he writes.
Whereas many novelists — Angus Wilson is the most obvious example constantly strive, not always to their advan- tage, to broaden their range, Hollinghurst seems deliberately to be narrowing his. In this he resembles Anita Brookner, another writer of outstanding intelligence, psycho- logical perception and elegance of style: Her major characters are largely well-to-do women of a certain age; his major charac- ters are largely well-to-do men of a certain persuasion. There is no doubt that this is a remark- able novel, but one wonders if Holling- hurst might not produce one even more remarkable if he were to decide no longer to be a gay novelist and instead became one who happens to be gay.
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