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The Spell
Here are the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late forties trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his young lover, Justin, a would-be actor increasingly disenchanted with the countryside; Robin's attractive and dangerously volatile twenty-two-year-old son Danny; and Justin's former boyfriend Alex, whose life is unexpectedly transformed by a night of house music and a tab of ecstasy.As each falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the illusions of love, and of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life: the hunger for contact and the fear of commitment, the need for permanence and the continual disruptions of sex. Ultimately, The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
96 people are currently reading
2284 people want to read
About the author
Alan Hollinghurst
40 books1,704 followersAlan Hollinghurst is an English novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.
He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.
In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London. In 1997, he went on an Asia book tour in Singapore.
In 1981 he joined The Times Literary Supplement and was the paper's deputy editor from 1982 to 1995.
He lives in London.
He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford graduating in 1975; and subsequently took the further degree of Master of Literature (1979). While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, the year before Motion.
In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London. In 1997, he went on an Asia book tour in Singapore.
In 1981 he joined The Times Literary Supplement and was the paper's deputy editor from 1982 to 1995.
He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 207 reviews
October 23, 2008
This book, which has been much-praised, goes to show that if your standing in the literary world is elevated enough, you can get away with writing a shit novel. I, too, love Alan Hollinghurst, but I cannot pretend this book is anything but awful.
The storyline (in as much as there is one) concerns a father and son, both gay, and their lovers (present and former, which include some overlap). However, what should be a fizzy soap opera is merely banal and depressing. The novel seems rudderless – not much happens and, when story threads do appear, they are too often yanked away without any sort of resolution. I suppose one could praise the novel for its realism, but, frankly, if I want realism, I’ll look out the window.
While reading the first half of the novel, I thought it was lacking in characterization. Then I realized that there is characterization – just enough that all the characters are impossible to like. Danny is fickle and callous; Robin is pompous and spiteful; Justin is shallow and dishonest; Alex is self-deluded and pitiable. Where most authors give their characters too few flaws, making them into unbelievable Mary Sues, Hollinghurst gives his characters too many flaws, but no redeeming qualities that might make them appear as real people. As a result, the interactions between the characters frequently fail to ring true. Hollinghurst makes some vague swipes at conjuring a complex, tension-filled father/son relationship, but ultimately fails to do so.
The theme (in as much as there is one) concerns growing old. Yet Hollinghurst can’t seem to find anything profound to say about the aging process. He simply sketches some clichés: doddering old men losing their marbles; vain middle-aged men trying to recapture their youth with younger men. Yawn. (It should go without saying that no major, or even secondary, female characters appear. Women scarcely exist in Hollinghurst’s world. Robin’s ex-wife – and mother to Danny – literally lives on another continent.)
Just as in his other novels, Hollinghurst’s pretty prose is on display here, but it’s not used to capture any depth or intensity. In The Line Of Beauty, the narrator has a self-effacing, magpie eye for his surroundings and it adds something to the text that he obsessively describes the accoutrements of each lavish house he visits. But here, the same level of description of architecture, furniture and miscellaneous objects is employed for seemingly no reason.
The level of irritation I feel for this novel is perhaps a misnomer, because it’s hardly interesting enough to get angry about. Quite simply, it’s a poorly-constructed novel about awful people that ultimately only manages to be boring.
The storyline (in as much as there is one) concerns a father and son, both gay, and their lovers (present and former, which include some overlap). However, what should be a fizzy soap opera is merely banal and depressing. The novel seems rudderless – not much happens and, when story threads do appear, they are too often yanked away without any sort of resolution. I suppose one could praise the novel for its realism, but, frankly, if I want realism, I’ll look out the window.
While reading the first half of the novel, I thought it was lacking in characterization. Then I realized that there is characterization – just enough that all the characters are impossible to like. Danny is fickle and callous; Robin is pompous and spiteful; Justin is shallow and dishonest; Alex is self-deluded and pitiable. Where most authors give their characters too few flaws, making them into unbelievable Mary Sues, Hollinghurst gives his characters too many flaws, but no redeeming qualities that might make them appear as real people. As a result, the interactions between the characters frequently fail to ring true. Hollinghurst makes some vague swipes at conjuring a complex, tension-filled father/son relationship, but ultimately fails to do so.
The theme (in as much as there is one) concerns growing old. Yet Hollinghurst can’t seem to find anything profound to say about the aging process. He simply sketches some clichés: doddering old men losing their marbles; vain middle-aged men trying to recapture their youth with younger men. Yawn. (It should go without saying that no major, or even secondary, female characters appear. Women scarcely exist in Hollinghurst’s world. Robin’s ex-wife – and mother to Danny – literally lives on another continent.)
Just as in his other novels, Hollinghurst’s pretty prose is on display here, but it’s not used to capture any depth or intensity. In The Line Of Beauty, the narrator has a self-effacing, magpie eye for his surroundings and it adds something to the text that he obsessively describes the accoutrements of each lavish house he visits. But here, the same level of description of architecture, furniture and miscellaneous objects is employed for seemingly no reason.
The level of irritation I feel for this novel is perhaps a misnomer, because it’s hardly interesting enough to get angry about. Quite simply, it’s a poorly-constructed novel about awful people that ultimately only manages to be boring.
September 30, 2009
This is the third of Hollinghurst’s four novels. And from what I can gather, the runt of the litter for quite a few of his readers. Not hard to see why, given what it followed: a brace of densely brilliant novels which permit us to richly inhabit the lyric sensibilities of two very sinuous and engaging first-person narrators (writers are still taking up the gauntlet of Lolita). The Spell, by contrast, flits among a circle of suggestively drawn but necessarily flatter London men. Hollinghurst does the comedy of manners thing superbly, anatomizing with high disabused humor the various nostalgias, jealousies, fears and hopeful fantasies of individuals under different sexual “spells.” The prose is cut to a severe standard, burnished to a glow, and made to reverberate epigrammatically; description often shades into aphorism. This is some of the best English prose of our time. The Spell makes me want to re-read The Line of Beauty, as now it seems the book in which Hollinghurst succeeded in combining his talents for both the subjective surrogate first-person voice and the all-seeing lofty observer, anchoring the narration at a definite point of view, Nick’s, while making Nick, because of his anxious, outsider/interloper status, clairvoyantly attentive to the minds and manners of the other characters. I wonder where he’ll go next.
October 2, 2017
Well disguised porn. Enthusiastically gay--the only type you can ever possibly find that's these things: dramatic, haunting, even poetic. Hollinghurst is incomparable; his niche is his very own.
September 1, 2007
Fiction. This book was so unpleasant I finished it in two days. I'd read a chapter, make a face, put the book down, and walk away. Later I'd find myself reading it again. It's a terrible book filled with gay men who are all cheating on each other. The really annoying thing is that it's quite well written so I kept reading even though I didn't want to. I wanted to see how it turned out, but I didn't care about any of the characters because they obviously didn't care about each other. So that was depressing.
Read this if you're looking for a well-written book filled with selfish, unlikeable people.
Read this if you're looking for a well-written book filled with selfish, unlikeable people.
June 9, 2014
"Ultimately, The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart," informs the Goodreads blurb. No, that is exactly wrong. What it details is the restlessness of the gay penis. The novel is about a group of gay men in 1990s Britain, ranging in age from late teens to mid-forties, who desperately try to determine the size and shape of other men's cock-and-balls in whatever pants or underwear begarbs them.
As such, the novel was about 70% too gay for me. It was like a dish that had two ingredients but needed five. Maybe the three lacking ingredients could have been plot, one or two heterosexual characters, and a nice murder or something. There were a couple heteros, but they were undeveloped, like stick figures.
There was a nice plot point late in the novel where one of the gay protagonists, viewing a house on the market, picks up his real estate agent's wallet in order to see if he has any photos of a wife or male lover. When the agent comes back in the room, he guiltily pockets the wallet and then has no opportunity to return it without looking like a smarmy idiot. This could have gone somewhere interesting, but Hollinghurst just dropped it and our man Justin went back to cock-and-ball inspecting.
Hollinghurst is a talented writer (this was his third novel), but The Spell just feels like a big wad of self-indulgence. No amount of description of cow-parsley in the fields can compensate for such a thin plot.
February 24, 2009
Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker, may be one of the best novels I've read, among those novels in the Forsterian/Jamesian tradition, if such a tradition can exist. You know what I'm talking about. Novels about the lives of interesting people just a shade more fascinating and a shade better looking than average, whose lives fall in the midst of some greater sociopolitical moment. &c &c. What's surprising is how that incredible novel came out of the writer who produced this small one.
It's not a bad book by any stretch. It tells the story of Alex, who is invited up (out? down? westward?) to Dorset by his ex-boyfriend Justin, to spend the weekend at his (Justin's) and his boyfriend, Robin's, cabin. While there he meets Robin's son Danny, who—because this is an early Hollinghurst novel and, thus, every man held within its chapters must be if not gay in full than at least game for some gay sex—is also gay and eventually falls for Alex. So you've got a nicely complex love quadrangle here, and what makes this novel work is that Hollinghurst moves among each man's close-third POV, so that as the novel progresses all four of them become more complicated and interesting.
But that's all they are is complicated and interesting. It's a perfectly competent novel, but I think just a little too small in scope for my tastes. And for Hollinghurst's; he's always better when he's got something larger to anchor his narrative to. In The Swimming Pool Library you can constantly read Hollinghurst trying to get a handle on Ronald Firbank, and in doing so he does a great job of connecting the newer, post-lib gay scene with the older pre-war closeted one. Line of Beauty would be nothing without the specter (and eventual manifestation) of Margaret Thatcher haunting its pages. Like take a look at this passage from that book:
"[Thatcher:] came in [to the house of one of the central characters, a conservative MP who's been courting her as a guest for the whole novel:] at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power. She looked ahead, into the unknown house, and everything she saw was a confirmation. The high hall mirror welcomed her, and in it the faces of the welcomers, some of whom, grand though they were, had a look beyond pride, a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once. She seemed pleased by the attention, and countered it cheerfully and practically, like modern royalty. She gave no sign of noting the colour of the front door" (328).
Maybe the like majesty of it is lost in excerpting, but my grand point here is that if Hollinghurst were a major league batter I'd accuse him of discovering steroids between 1998 and whenever Line of Beauty was written. It's just on a whole other scale, and seeing as how that latest novel owes as much of itself to Henry James as it does M. Thatcher, I may imagine Hollinghurst's "juice" was the master himself.
It's not a bad book by any stretch. It tells the story of Alex, who is invited up (out? down? westward?) to Dorset by his ex-boyfriend Justin, to spend the weekend at his (Justin's) and his boyfriend, Robin's, cabin. While there he meets Robin's son Danny, who—because this is an early Hollinghurst novel and, thus, every man held within its chapters must be if not gay in full than at least game for some gay sex—is also gay and eventually falls for Alex. So you've got a nicely complex love quadrangle here, and what makes this novel work is that Hollinghurst moves among each man's close-third POV, so that as the novel progresses all four of them become more complicated and interesting.
But that's all they are is complicated and interesting. It's a perfectly competent novel, but I think just a little too small in scope for my tastes. And for Hollinghurst's; he's always better when he's got something larger to anchor his narrative to. In The Swimming Pool Library you can constantly read Hollinghurst trying to get a handle on Ronald Firbank, and in doing so he does a great job of connecting the newer, post-lib gay scene with the older pre-war closeted one. Line of Beauty would be nothing without the specter (and eventual manifestation) of Margaret Thatcher haunting its pages. Like take a look at this passage from that book:
"[Thatcher:] came in [to the house of one of the central characters, a conservative MP who's been courting her as a guest for the whole novel:] at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power. She looked ahead, into the unknown house, and everything she saw was a confirmation. The high hall mirror welcomed her, and in it the faces of the welcomers, some of whom, grand though they were, had a look beyond pride, a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once. She seemed pleased by the attention, and countered it cheerfully and practically, like modern royalty. She gave no sign of noting the colour of the front door" (328).
Maybe the like majesty of it is lost in excerpting, but my grand point here is that if Hollinghurst were a major league batter I'd accuse him of discovering steroids between 1998 and whenever Line of Beauty was written. It's just on a whole other scale, and seeing as how that latest novel owes as much of itself to Henry James as it does M. Thatcher, I may imagine Hollinghurst's "juice" was the master himself.
September 19, 2016
Although to my mind Hollinghurst CAN'T write a truly bad book, this does not live up to the sheer brilliance of the other three of his I have read... it just didn't have the compulsive forward thrust that keeps one really interested. Am not sure exactly why that should be: the prose is gorgeous as always, and the characters are varied and for the most part interesting. But this short book took me longer to read than his magnum opus, The Line of Beauty, so something didn't quite click.
June 11, 2023
Beautifully written book about terrible people 😄
I love Alan Hollonghurst's writing, his way with words is incredible. Here I could smell the countryside, feel the heat and visualise the condensation on the gin and tonics.
The characters though, my word what a bunch of privileged wankers!! Well except Terry, but he didn't come across well either. 😅
Excellent reading for a heatwave..
I love Alan Hollonghurst's writing, his way with words is incredible. Here I could smell the countryside, feel the heat and visualise the condensation on the gin and tonics.
The characters though, my word what a bunch of privileged wankers!! Well except Terry, but he didn't come across well either. 😅
Excellent reading for a heatwave..
Read
January 7, 2023When I first read The Spell, perhaps 15 years ago, the book seemed deliberately over-sexed. Horniness for its own sake, absurd and enjoyable. I remembered the place-name Crewkerne and a lot of architecture-talk, and that there was a betrayal. Country-mouse, city-mouse stuff.
Now I live in the country myself, like Robin, and like Robin I am in my 40's. And The Spell reads as a shockingly perceptive and truthful story about what we gay guys are like. How our self-expression fuses genuine-ness and fakery, with a heavy dose of subtext. The blurry space between friend and rival and ex lover.
As usual, Hollinghurst's playground is the complexity of what happens inside his characters' minds: "He saw he was keen not to wound Justin by praising Nick's real merits."
It makes sense, but amazes me, that Hollinghurst is able to capture, precisely, the world-conquering euphoria of being on ecstasy. "Everything was immediate, but seemed to have started, unnoticed, a few seconds before." I actually was worried the rhythmic pulsing in my head would make it impossible to sleep after reading this chapter.
There are so many sentences, grafs that I now wish I had marked up. Maybe next time I read it.
As with SATC or Golden Girls, we have four principal characters, who each stand for something somewhat different. Much as one is a Miranda or a Dorothy, with this book one is most likely an Alex. Cultivated, accomplished, and pathetic. Well meaning, missing some of the essential code to know how to "hang," and needing love and affection more than he needs sex.
What a magnificent book.
Now I live in the country myself, like Robin, and like Robin I am in my 40's. And The Spell reads as a shockingly perceptive and truthful story about what we gay guys are like. How our self-expression fuses genuine-ness and fakery, with a heavy dose of subtext. The blurry space between friend and rival and ex lover.
As usual, Hollinghurst's playground is the complexity of what happens inside his characters' minds: "He saw he was keen not to wound Justin by praising Nick's real merits."
It makes sense, but amazes me, that Hollinghurst is able to capture, precisely, the world-conquering euphoria of being on ecstasy. "Everything was immediate, but seemed to have started, unnoticed, a few seconds before." I actually was worried the rhythmic pulsing in my head would make it impossible to sleep after reading this chapter.
There are so many sentences, grafs that I now wish I had marked up. Maybe next time I read it.
As with SATC or Golden Girls, we have four principal characters, who each stand for something somewhat different. Much as one is a Miranda or a Dorothy, with this book one is most likely an Alex. Cultivated, accomplished, and pathetic. Well meaning, missing some of the essential code to know how to "hang," and needing love and affection more than he needs sex.
What a magnificent book.
May 7, 2023
Once again I found myself under the spell of Hollinghurst’s sharp observation and honest insight, enchanted by the uneasy conflicts and sexcapades of four interlinked gay men in the late 90s.
September 29, 2025
I feel some what wicked for giving this novel two stars - Hollinghurst is still a bloody good writer - but I can't help feeling that the real problem with this novel is that it is attempting to write about a world - that of young gay men and the trends and habits there of - that was no longer a world that Alan Hollinghurst was neither entirely welcome in, or at home in. Mr. Hollinghurst is no longer the enfant terrible or the young man about town that he was when he wrote 'The Line of Beauty' or 'The Swimming Pool Library' not even the older young man who wrote 'The Folding Star' - he is definitely older and the attempt to capture again, or stay part of the world/relevance, of his earlier novels and this novel reads as an obvious straining after youth or to connect with youth and both his own youth and the youths he used to bed have long fled (God that is bitchy - I am almost tempted to remove it but the novel is just cringingly embarrassing - like a Dad dancing at a wedding). I don't think we should be surprised that all his recent novels have gone into the past rather then deal with the present. He is an author well worth reading (is he? - I am reading this review again and correcting some mistakes, it is September 2025 and I am not so sure) but I think this book can skipped without qualm.
July 20, 2007
Hollinghurst's prose is as frank and lush as ever in The Spell. He reveals his characters' intricate internal worlds; to the reader's benefit, they are wonderfully observant and self-aware, yet they do not communicate well with one another. They withhold information; they hesitate to reveal themselves. It's not unexplored territory, but Hollinghurst deals brilliantly with characters' emotional and psychological lives. I'm left wondering if they're all happy with who and what they end up with, or are they making the best of their situations. I find these to be satisfying questions.
In some ways, they seem familiar, and I find myself and people I know in these characters. What frustrates me is that their world is so white and (upper) middle class. Non-white characters are rarely mentioned, and when they are, they arouse suspicion in some of the main characters. Also, the main characters don't worry about money (except, perhaps, while waiting for one's inheritance to come through). At times, the homogeneity gets a little distracting.
In some ways, they seem familiar, and I find myself and people I know in these characters. What frustrates me is that their world is so white and (upper) middle class. Non-white characters are rarely mentioned, and when they are, they arouse suspicion in some of the main characters. Also, the main characters don't worry about money (except, perhaps, while waiting for one's inheritance to come through). At times, the homogeneity gets a little distracting.
September 21, 2022
Sex and drugs and techno music in the Devon countryside.
So, Justin used to go out with Alex but left him for Robin who he met in a public toilet. Alex is now going out with Dan who is Robin's son. Then there's Terry the local handyman and rent boy. Alan Hollinghurst has a real skill in being able to write the most loathsome of gay characters and all the main characters have a stab at winning that award but Justin wins hands down, a truly hideous being.
So, Justin used to go out with Alex but left him for Robin who he met in a public toilet. Alex is now going out with Dan who is Robin's son. Then there's Terry the local handyman and rent boy. Alan Hollinghurst has a real skill in being able to write the most loathsome of gay characters and all the main characters have a stab at winning that award but Justin wins hands down, a truly hideous being.
September 22, 2024
Het doet me pijn dat ik dit verhaal zo beroerd vind, Hollinghurst is namelijk ook de schrijver van het indrukwekkende The Line of Beauty. Maar hier was, ondanks Hollinghursts mooie schrijfstijl, geen doorkomen aan. De personages zijn onsympathiek en belazeren elkaar en praten over seks, denken aan seks of zijn bezig met seks en dat is het. Na 173 van de 319 blz ben ik er wel klaar mee.
August 22, 2014
Alan Hollinghurst writes lush, beautiful sentences about lush, beautiful men who spend lots of time staring hungrily at each other’s bodies and sleeping with each other’s boyfriends. Compared to his other novels, this one was a bit of a lightweight (definitely not the same caliber as either The Swimming-Pool Library or The Line of Beauty, both of which would probably make my top 25). But he’s such an amazingly astute observer of character that I didn’t even mind—and my god, what gorgeous prose.
February 4, 2011
4 stars becuz of the extremely lengthy descriptions of environment.
May 7, 2024
a hoot! my favourite hollinghurst i think
September 5, 2019
There's no denying that Hollinghurst is one of the most influential queer writers in the past 50 years and "The Spell" with its carefully crafted prose and intelligent exploration of gay life in the 90s proves why. Nevertheless, compared to the other two Hollinghurst books I have read, "The Swimming Pool Library" (which is great) and "The Line of Beauty" (which is a masterpiece), "The Spell" feels more like a throwaway work.
It's quite a short novel and the characters don't have the usual depth I expect in Hollingurst's fiction. At the same time the narrative lacks a driving force and the novel is more or less comprised almost entirely of chapters of episodic nature, giving us a slice of the protagonists' lives. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I couldn't help but have the impression that Hollinghurst wasn't as inspired writing this as he was when he was writing one of his truly great works (immediately after this he wrote "The Line of Beauty" which is probably one of the best British novels of the past 5 decades).
My biggest complaint with the work though is that it never feels like it deals with the decade of the 90s that much. When I read on the back of my paperback that the story was set in the 90s, I was pleasantly surprised and expected Hollinghurst to venture away from his usual settings in posh British country houses and give us something more gritty and dirty and underground. I was slightly disappointed though to realise that the work is still focused on aristocrats and most of it takes places in the aforementioned country houses, giving the narrative a timeless feel and harkening back to Hollinghurst's favourite: Henry James. We do get a lot of sex and drugs and parties in nightclubs but it all feels like it could have been set at any time really. I wish we could have gotten more of a feel of the 90s culture and a deeper exploration of the AIDS crisis, which is barely even mentioned.
Despite my complaints, a throwaway Hollinghurst work is still an excellent work and "The Spell" is definitely worth reading, but perhaps not as your introduction to Hollinghurst's wonderful writing.
It's quite a short novel and the characters don't have the usual depth I expect in Hollingurst's fiction. At the same time the narrative lacks a driving force and the novel is more or less comprised almost entirely of chapters of episodic nature, giving us a slice of the protagonists' lives. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I couldn't help but have the impression that Hollinghurst wasn't as inspired writing this as he was when he was writing one of his truly great works (immediately after this he wrote "The Line of Beauty" which is probably one of the best British novels of the past 5 decades).
My biggest complaint with the work though is that it never feels like it deals with the decade of the 90s that much. When I read on the back of my paperback that the story was set in the 90s, I was pleasantly surprised and expected Hollinghurst to venture away from his usual settings in posh British country houses and give us something more gritty and dirty and underground. I was slightly disappointed though to realise that the work is still focused on aristocrats and most of it takes places in the aforementioned country houses, giving the narrative a timeless feel and harkening back to Hollinghurst's favourite: Henry James. We do get a lot of sex and drugs and parties in nightclubs but it all feels like it could have been set at any time really. I wish we could have gotten more of a feel of the 90s culture and a deeper exploration of the AIDS crisis, which is barely even mentioned.
Despite my complaints, a throwaway Hollinghurst work is still an excellent work and "The Spell" is definitely worth reading, but perhaps not as your introduction to Hollinghurst's wonderful writing.
October 19, 2024
Alan Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell, is unique in his bibliography, qualitatively and, if you like, quantitively, in some compelling but confusing ways. His novels have tended to be huge six-hundred-or-so page tomes, large-scale state of the nation works which announce themselves formally and sometimes explicitly to be the inheritors of the Jane Austen and Henry James type of social novel. The Spell, on the other hand, barely makes it over the two-hundred page mark, and lacks the expansive social vision and criticism that his other novels are able to offer.
The novel is described on the blurb as a “comedy of sexual manners”, and the placement of those terms is more revealing than it might seem. At points in the novel I wondered if it perhaps could do with being inverted: “a sexual comedy of manners”; I occasionally felt as though the novel represented something that maybe could have been a sexless comedy of manners, but which had had sex smothered onto it, resulting in a sort of neutral, traditional comedy of manners rendered sexual by Hollinghurst’s desire to just do so. But I think the description is in general more accurate, as the “sexual manners” the novel deals with are, themselves, indeed, comedic, and a source of comedy; so in a way it’s the inverse of my first thought: it’s not a comedic novel rendered sexual, but rather a sexual novel that can’t help coming across as comedic.
The novel is a more or less plotless affair, a quasi-modernist carousel of narratives which focalise, revolvingly, on the perspectives of each of a set of four gay men, whose sex lives are intertwined beyond belief, twisted into a Gordian knot of desire that binds itself up even across age and family lines. The sexual extremities on display here, and the neutrality with which they’re described, seem to amount to (to borrow the novel’s term slightly) a transvaluation of all sexual values, in which regard the novel brings to mind the works of Jean Genet, in particular. And it’s interesting that it does so, seeing as it resembles a piece of Genet-inclining modernist prose fiction.
But it does so only in a limited way. I suppose the novel resembles Genet in a world where, instead of spending years in prison for homosexuality, Genet had gone to boarding school and then got two degrees Oxford. This is a pretty colloquial phrasing of what I do in fact take to be the novel’s problem. In The Spell, Hollinghurst appears to have tried his hand at writing an airy, elusive, plotless circuit of intermingling sexual psychologies; but this kind of narrative can only succeed if the writer is genuinely willing to relinquish an insistence upon facts and details, actual and mental, to allow the novel, which he wants to be evocative, to actually evoke. Let me explain.
*
The kind of novel that Hollinghurst intended to write with The Spell only really works by being slightly elusive and unclear. But Hollinghurst can’t seem to shake off his formal affinity with the Victorian and Edwardian novelists: I mean, he did write his MA thesis on the novels of Forster, Firbank and Hartley. Perhaps this novel would have succeeded more if Hollinghurst were able to stop describing his characters’ every thought with a level of self-evaluation and insight that, if they actually had at the time of the events the novel describes, maybe they may not have acted this way and produced the plot the descriptions are describing. A veritable paradox!
I mean, just look at the state of this sentence: “Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.” This is the kind of sentence the modernists with whom The Spell is implying an affinity would never write; can you imagine Jean Genet, Woolf, Mansfield, writing? Sentences like this, which are constant in the novel, imply a razor-sharp awareness and ability to monitor all the thoughts and feelings that stream through a character’s mind, an awareness that people just don’t have in real life, and which, looking at the actual plot of the novel, the characters certainly don’t have. Moreover, this kind of penetrative, retroactive psychological insight is not conducive to the success of the kind of novel that The Spell is striving to be. Those kinds of novels work by exploiting the evocative, richly sensual, the whiff of the unconscious occasionally finding its way to the surface, for instance. I guess what I mean is: a novel can’t be this plotless and unbelievable whilst also maintaining an Edwardian, Bennett-esque on the details, the events, of real life and the mind.
I shall offer a comparison by examples. Here’s an extract from Our Lady of the Flowers:
“Now, as there was no bathtub in Darling’s home, he used to be dipped into a wash basin. Today, or some other day, though it seems to me today, while he was sleeping, he dreamed that he was entering a wash basin. He isn’t, of course, able to analyze himself, nor would he dream of trying to, but he is sensitive to the tricks of fate, and to the tricks of the theatre of fear. When Divine answers, “I’m doing the wash basin,” he thinks she is saying it to mean “I’m playing at being the wash basin,” as if she were “doing” a role. (She might have said: “I’m doing a locomotive.”) He suddenly gets an erection from the feeling that he has penetrated Divine in a dream. In his dream he penetrates the Divine of the dream of Divine, and he possesses her, as it were, in a spiritual debauch, And the following phrases come into his mind: “To the heart, to the hilt, right to the balls, right in the throat.””
This is one extract which actually bears some likeness, content-wise, with The Spell, but obviously is different in ways, ways that make it succeed. There is, I admit, a suggestion of genuine self-awareness (“he thinks she is saying It to mean […]”), but it of course ultimately falls, in favour of an obscuring, evocative stream of little psychic convulsions which imply rather than state the psycho-sexual state of affairs. Of course, to be fair, Our Lady of the Flowers is a first-person account, and the minds of the characters it describes obviously can’t reasonably be traced by the limited narrational capacity of Jean; whereas the free-indirect-discourse of The Spell nominally allows for the narrator to know everything about its character’s motivations. But firstly, novels of this sort blur the lines between these distinct modes of narration anyway, and moreover, the very fact of that difference is part of The Spell’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt a precise formal mode, one that allows for the plotless narrative circle it wants to be. Here is Hollinghurst in The Spell describing a comparable psychological moment:
“One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he [Justin] rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well.”
In both of these extracts, Genet and Hollinghurst are basically attempting to describe gay men absent-mindedly considering sex. But in the Genet, although the narration is of course much more imprecise, we get a much more emphatic understanding of Darling’s essence. Whereas in the Hollinghurst, every single quivering of psychological motive is aired by the narrator. And let’s face it. There’s nothing more unsexy than having attention drawn to all your actual thoughts. Simply stating everything may work in some novels, but not in a novel which strives to be airy and elusive, and especially not in one which allies itself with the queerly modernist aesthetic. Not to be basic, but I can’t help recalling these words from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”:
“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians' fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman's character ? And they said, " Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -” But I cried, " Stop ! Stop !" […]”
Woolf is, unsurprisingly, right; and Hollinghurst, striving to emulate the style of the queer modernists, ought to remember that there was a reason “modernism” felt a need to supplant the Arnold Bennetts of the world. The extreme nature of the psychological self-awareness in The Spell is completely dissonant with the seemingly unmotivated randomness of the events which form the threadbare plot of the novel. The narration implicitly claims and enjoys a staggering insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters; and yet if all this was, in fact, actually available to the foursome of characters in the novel, they would, I’m sure, have acted differently. Couple Robin and Justin both independently sleeping with the much younger rent boy lover of Robin’s own son, for instance, was a quasi-incestuous moment that makes one question what the use of these layers and layers of psychological detail exactly is.
Still, to be fair to Hollinghurst, this seems to be the novel that he had to write, quite early in his career, in order to get out of his system everything that would have otherwise stood in the way of the brilliance of his later novels such as The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. And as well, it’s worth putting the novel in its proper context. One of Hollinghurst’s intentions, I think, has always been to properly render gay psychology to make it seem normal to a general reading public. The Spell was released in 1998, and I guess at this time a novel which attends to and presents the psychology of the gays was likely worth having around. So this novel isn’t really as major an outlier amongst Hollinghurst’s bibliography as I had assumed. It’s more like a typical Hollinghurst novel which couldn’t help but fall under the spell of the modernists; and as for the characters, the spell of an attractive external influence can be difficult to resist.
The novel is described on the blurb as a “comedy of sexual manners”, and the placement of those terms is more revealing than it might seem. At points in the novel I wondered if it perhaps could do with being inverted: “a sexual comedy of manners”; I occasionally felt as though the novel represented something that maybe could have been a sexless comedy of manners, but which had had sex smothered onto it, resulting in a sort of neutral, traditional comedy of manners rendered sexual by Hollinghurst’s desire to just do so. But I think the description is in general more accurate, as the “sexual manners” the novel deals with are, themselves, indeed, comedic, and a source of comedy; so in a way it’s the inverse of my first thought: it’s not a comedic novel rendered sexual, but rather a sexual novel that can’t help coming across as comedic.
The novel is a more or less plotless affair, a quasi-modernist carousel of narratives which focalise, revolvingly, on the perspectives of each of a set of four gay men, whose sex lives are intertwined beyond belief, twisted into a Gordian knot of desire that binds itself up even across age and family lines. The sexual extremities on display here, and the neutrality with which they’re described, seem to amount to (to borrow the novel’s term slightly) a transvaluation of all sexual values, in which regard the novel brings to mind the works of Jean Genet, in particular. And it’s interesting that it does so, seeing as it resembles a piece of Genet-inclining modernist prose fiction.
But it does so only in a limited way. I suppose the novel resembles Genet in a world where, instead of spending years in prison for homosexuality, Genet had gone to boarding school and then got two degrees Oxford. This is a pretty colloquial phrasing of what I do in fact take to be the novel’s problem. In The Spell, Hollinghurst appears to have tried his hand at writing an airy, elusive, plotless circuit of intermingling sexual psychologies; but this kind of narrative can only succeed if the writer is genuinely willing to relinquish an insistence upon facts and details, actual and mental, to allow the novel, which he wants to be evocative, to actually evoke. Let me explain.
*
The kind of novel that Hollinghurst intended to write with The Spell only really works by being slightly elusive and unclear. But Hollinghurst can’t seem to shake off his formal affinity with the Victorian and Edwardian novelists: I mean, he did write his MA thesis on the novels of Forster, Firbank and Hartley. Perhaps this novel would have succeeded more if Hollinghurst were able to stop describing his characters’ every thought with a level of self-evaluation and insight that, if they actually had at the time of the events the novel describes, maybe they may not have acted this way and produced the plot the descriptions are describing. A veritable paradox!
I mean, just look at the state of this sentence: “Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.” This is the kind of sentence the modernists with whom The Spell is implying an affinity would never write; can you imagine Jean Genet, Woolf, Mansfield, writing? Sentences like this, which are constant in the novel, imply a razor-sharp awareness and ability to monitor all the thoughts and feelings that stream through a character’s mind, an awareness that people just don’t have in real life, and which, looking at the actual plot of the novel, the characters certainly don’t have. Moreover, this kind of penetrative, retroactive psychological insight is not conducive to the success of the kind of novel that The Spell is striving to be. Those kinds of novels work by exploiting the evocative, richly sensual, the whiff of the unconscious occasionally finding its way to the surface, for instance. I guess what I mean is: a novel can’t be this plotless and unbelievable whilst also maintaining an Edwardian, Bennett-esque on the details, the events, of real life and the mind.
I shall offer a comparison by examples. Here’s an extract from Our Lady of the Flowers:
“Now, as there was no bathtub in Darling’s home, he used to be dipped into a wash basin. Today, or some other day, though it seems to me today, while he was sleeping, he dreamed that he was entering a wash basin. He isn’t, of course, able to analyze himself, nor would he dream of trying to, but he is sensitive to the tricks of fate, and to the tricks of the theatre of fear. When Divine answers, “I’m doing the wash basin,” he thinks she is saying it to mean “I’m playing at being the wash basin,” as if she were “doing” a role. (She might have said: “I’m doing a locomotive.”) He suddenly gets an erection from the feeling that he has penetrated Divine in a dream. In his dream he penetrates the Divine of the dream of Divine, and he possesses her, as it were, in a spiritual debauch, And the following phrases come into his mind: “To the heart, to the hilt, right to the balls, right in the throat.””
This is one extract which actually bears some likeness, content-wise, with The Spell, but obviously is different in ways, ways that make it succeed. There is, I admit, a suggestion of genuine self-awareness (“he thinks she is saying It to mean […]”), but it of course ultimately falls, in favour of an obscuring, evocative stream of little psychic convulsions which imply rather than state the psycho-sexual state of affairs. Of course, to be fair, Our Lady of the Flowers is a first-person account, and the minds of the characters it describes obviously can’t reasonably be traced by the limited narrational capacity of Jean; whereas the free-indirect-discourse of The Spell nominally allows for the narrator to know everything about its character’s motivations. But firstly, novels of this sort blur the lines between these distinct modes of narration anyway, and moreover, the very fact of that difference is part of The Spell’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt a precise formal mode, one that allows for the plotless narrative circle it wants to be. Here is Hollinghurst in The Spell describing a comparable psychological moment:
“One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he [Justin] rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well.”
In both of these extracts, Genet and Hollinghurst are basically attempting to describe gay men absent-mindedly considering sex. But in the Genet, although the narration is of course much more imprecise, we get a much more emphatic understanding of Darling’s essence. Whereas in the Hollinghurst, every single quivering of psychological motive is aired by the narrator. And let’s face it. There’s nothing more unsexy than having attention drawn to all your actual thoughts. Simply stating everything may work in some novels, but not in a novel which strives to be airy and elusive, and especially not in one which allies itself with the queerly modernist aesthetic. Not to be basic, but I can’t help recalling these words from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”:
“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians' fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman's character ? And they said, " Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -” But I cried, " Stop ! Stop !" […]”
Woolf is, unsurprisingly, right; and Hollinghurst, striving to emulate the style of the queer modernists, ought to remember that there was a reason “modernism” felt a need to supplant the Arnold Bennetts of the world. The extreme nature of the psychological self-awareness in The Spell is completely dissonant with the seemingly unmotivated randomness of the events which form the threadbare plot of the novel. The narration implicitly claims and enjoys a staggering insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters; and yet if all this was, in fact, actually available to the foursome of characters in the novel, they would, I’m sure, have acted differently. Couple Robin and Justin both independently sleeping with the much younger rent boy lover of Robin’s own son, for instance, was a quasi-incestuous moment that makes one question what the use of these layers and layers of psychological detail exactly is.
Still, to be fair to Hollinghurst, this seems to be the novel that he had to write, quite early in his career, in order to get out of his system everything that would have otherwise stood in the way of the brilliance of his later novels such as The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. And as well, it’s worth putting the novel in its proper context. One of Hollinghurst’s intentions, I think, has always been to properly render gay psychology to make it seem normal to a general reading public. The Spell was released in 1998, and I guess at this time a novel which attends to and presents the psychology of the gays was likely worth having around. So this novel isn’t really as major an outlier amongst Hollinghurst’s bibliography as I had assumed. It’s more like a typical Hollinghurst novel which couldn’t help but fall under the spell of the modernists; and as for the characters, the spell of an attractive external influence can be difficult to resist.
April 10, 2021
"He clearly had no idea of the psychic shock, to someone like himself, of falling in love. Danny would be a great lover, that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians knew nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it."
I really enjoyed the other Alan Hollinghurst book I read, The Swimming-Pool Library, but had two main criticisms when I'd finished it: one was that it was vastly over-written, and the other was that it was not over-plotted but rather over-thematicised.
The Spell, I'm able to state in comparison, is only slightly over-written, and if anything vastly under-thematicised.
It's not that I expect every book I read to be a wellspring of depth, but I was waiting quite a while for this one to not feel so much like just an overlong episode of Queer As Folk and I'm not sure it ever did. The back cover of my copy calls it "a comedy of sexual manners", and it is sexual, and very mannered, but never really has the space to be funny.
The book is at its best, I guess, when it's delving into one of my favourite subjects: the invisible dynamics hidden far beneath the web of relationships between the characters. And there are a lot of interesting dynamics at play -- particularly in the close look at age gap relationships and the role of drug culture in modern queer life.
But, I mean, at the end of the day the main characters are still only four upper-middle class white British gay men. They don't have much differentiation between them (particularly in how annoyingly they all say "darling" in practically every sentence), and pretty much the extent of the relationship dynamics Hollinghurst is interested in is how they all constantly screw everything that moves in unendingly vapid attempts to psychically wound each other.
And I guess finally I just found this a pretty misanthropic or even a nihilistic view of queer relationships, since the characters spend the entire page count all trying to backstab each other for... what? Seeking companionship, or for just being gay in the first place as it began finally to feel?
I included that quote at the top since it's one of the very few times in the entire book (and at the very end, too) that the concept of love even comes into play at all. No surprise it's about a character devoid of it entirely. As a concept it's strangely absent; so much so that it started to make the story feel empty as I basically asked myself have any of these people ever loved each other at any point or are they all completely bereft of it? Does anyone in this world of the story love at all? And more importantly, where are the books where this can be more at the forefront of queer stories instead of constant self-hatred and maliciousness?
July 31, 2022
This feels like a clash of style vs themes. The descriptive writing of place is beautiful and evocative and the characters, primarily 4 men and their lovers are fleshed out (no pun intended),to the extent that you can tangibly feel the givers and the takers ( as Hollinghurst frequently refers to them.) beyond the gay sex and the drugs which release them, it is really about different sorts of relationships - and the striving to find a love that transcends age or sex. The two primary locations are contrasted hugely-, the cut and thrust or the London gay scene with its availability of casual sex, clubs , hustle and bustle with the sedate faded elegance of a small Dorset village ( which sounds pretty idyllic to me) The cleverness for me of this book is how what could read as sensationalist and almost smutty is transmuted by the fabulous prose and numerous puns . Some of its charm is highlighted because of the wealth and status of some of the characters- the trappings of their cultures backgrounds - art, architecture, opera, antiques… this too, however, contrasts with the have nots - who become the embodiment of physicality. It was a short book though is not a quick read.
August 2, 2012
Wow, this book is bad. Nearly all the characters are hollow, superficial, empty... that doesn't make it easy to like them or even care about them (but maybe that's intentional... what do I know?).
The Swimming-Pool Library
wasn't anything special either, but this one is terrible.
I was tempted to give The Spell two stars but that would be too harsh. In the end, it's just a gay variation of chick lit. No artistic value expected/required.
Read it if you need to turn off your brain but stay occupied with something without a lasting impression, typically on plain or on holiday. It's the kind of book you can lose, not finish, or misplace, and not even care.
I was tempted to give The Spell two stars but that would be too harsh. In the end, it's just a gay variation of chick lit. No artistic value expected/required.
Read it if you need to turn off your brain but stay occupied with something without a lasting impression, typically on plain or on holiday. It's the kind of book you can lose, not finish, or misplace, and not even care.
July 29, 2024
This book is a bit of fun involving a handful of characters in London and Dorset. It is much lighter than Hollinghurst’s other works and it is intended to be that way. If you are looking for gay literary fiction to read on the beach or while traveling, this is the book for you.
Btw I don’t know why Goodreads said it took me 12 days to read it. You could probable knock this one off on a long plane ride.
I have to confess I have read several times, each time because I was looking for something light to lift my mood.
Btw I don’t know why Goodreads said it took me 12 days to read it. You could probable knock this one off on a long plane ride.
I have to confess I have read several times, each time because I was looking for something light to lift my mood.
February 24, 2019
A novel for the Cucumber-Banana-Tofu generation: depressing. It doesn't offer any redemption either, which I find unnecessarily bleak and negative. Of course, this has nothing to do with the writing, which is quite wonderful, as has been since Hollinghurst's debut. I guess there is some point in all this, all these lies and backstabbing and disappointments... I just don't find them all that entertaining.
April 6, 2019
A somber narrated story about four men drifting and drinking. Not able to communicate, connect or imagine a future. Great characters. Well written.
December 18, 2024
What happens if you change the girls in Sex and the City with gays, the city for London, add drugs and lots of telenovela interactions? Loved it.
June 27, 2022
I came to The Spell looking for a lighthearted summer romp and found exactly that—a bit too noncommittal, aloof, and vapid for me to feel consistently invested in the characters though. If the entire book had focused on Alex’s perspective, as in the exquisite final chapter, I would have been totally enamored with it. Hollinghurst too often shies away from his sensitive, earnest character in favor of the pithy, catty, scandalizing ones and I wish he wouldn’t as the bit grows tired quick.
The book is at its best when Hollinghurst meditates on Alex’s loneliness, alienation, and desire to give more than most are willing to accept. These pathetic (as in pathos-arousing, not a value judgment) qualities don’t grate me here as they do in Garth Greenwell, because Hollinghurst doesn’t dwell in piteousness or piousness or disappointment; his sensitive characters have enough depth and self-awareness to recognize when their desires are pathetic or that they are just totally misplaced among their aloof, instant-gratification-seeking peers and need a change. The flip side of what’s missing here is any direct extended attention to the emptiness, anomie, and solipsism characters like Justin and Danny would probably feel upon stepping back and realizing that they can claim few deep, meaningful relationships as a result of their innumerable infidelities and lack of concern for the feelings of others. There is no moment of hamartia, no reckoning with the aftereffects of romantic treachery, which is after all the central focus of the book.
I did get the easy, light summer romp I was looking for, but left feeling disengaged from the depraved roundelay of haughtiness, betrayal, elitism, and nonstop objectification played by this web of gay friends, paramours, and relatives. Hollinghurst seems to think gay men are only capable of seeing each other as slabs of meat! By the end, I was longing for some earnestness, humility, and non-sexualized kinship. I laughed when “For the first time, it struck [Robin] as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet,” a delayed insight that probably best sums up the book’s sensibility.
Alongside the slaphappy sexual games, Hollinghurst weaves in some subtle images of gay assimilation into heteronormative institutions, prophetic of the decade to follow. Institutions like parenthood (Robin is Danny’s father from a prior heterosexual relationship), marriage (Alex can’t find a partner to commit to him long-term), and nuclear homeownership (Justin forces himself to grow comfortable in Robin’s Dorset cottage; also briefly and indirectly depicted in an Edwardian mansion’s conversion to apartments, an attempt at atomizing a traditional nuclear family property that is ultimately abandoned) all make appearances here, conveying the gradual, awkward, compulsory movement toward a homonormative future. True to the late 90’s setting, Hollinghurst’s attitude toward this shift is characterized by loose indifference, simultaneously shrugging off the sense of encroachment and acknowledging its proximity.
Overall quite fun and breezy but lacking in the art of earnest, devoted romance (probably Hollinghurst’s unstated point).
The book is at its best when Hollinghurst meditates on Alex’s loneliness, alienation, and desire to give more than most are willing to accept. These pathetic (as in pathos-arousing, not a value judgment) qualities don’t grate me here as they do in Garth Greenwell, because Hollinghurst doesn’t dwell in piteousness or piousness or disappointment; his sensitive characters have enough depth and self-awareness to recognize when their desires are pathetic or that they are just totally misplaced among their aloof, instant-gratification-seeking peers and need a change. The flip side of what’s missing here is any direct extended attention to the emptiness, anomie, and solipsism characters like Justin and Danny would probably feel upon stepping back and realizing that they can claim few deep, meaningful relationships as a result of their innumerable infidelities and lack of concern for the feelings of others. There is no moment of hamartia, no reckoning with the aftereffects of romantic treachery, which is after all the central focus of the book.
I did get the easy, light summer romp I was looking for, but left feeling disengaged from the depraved roundelay of haughtiness, betrayal, elitism, and nonstop objectification played by this web of gay friends, paramours, and relatives. Hollinghurst seems to think gay men are only capable of seeing each other as slabs of meat! By the end, I was longing for some earnestness, humility, and non-sexualized kinship. I laughed when “For the first time, it struck [Robin] as absurd to expect loyalty from someone he had met in a toilet,” a delayed insight that probably best sums up the book’s sensibility.
Alongside the slaphappy sexual games, Hollinghurst weaves in some subtle images of gay assimilation into heteronormative institutions, prophetic of the decade to follow. Institutions like parenthood (Robin is Danny’s father from a prior heterosexual relationship), marriage (Alex can’t find a partner to commit to him long-term), and nuclear homeownership (Justin forces himself to grow comfortable in Robin’s Dorset cottage; also briefly and indirectly depicted in an Edwardian mansion’s conversion to apartments, an attempt at atomizing a traditional nuclear family property that is ultimately abandoned) all make appearances here, conveying the gradual, awkward, compulsory movement toward a homonormative future. True to the late 90’s setting, Hollinghurst’s attitude toward this shift is characterized by loose indifference, simultaneously shrugging off the sense of encroachment and acknowledging its proximity.
Overall quite fun and breezy but lacking in the art of earnest, devoted romance (probably Hollinghurst’s unstated point).
April 26, 2025
I just love Hollinghurst and I am so glad he writes about gay men the way he does. This was his third book and it was infamous for being boring, a drag and just mediocre from the reviews I have read. I was sacred stiff of reading a Hollinghurst that would disappoint me. However, I did not think it was bad at all. In fact, I enjoyed this 1999-novel quite a lot. Written from alternating third person perspectives of a set of related gay men, this style of the novel can take a little time of getting used to but once you've got the hang, you're sure to fly through it. We see Robin who is in America for a research in the late 70s and is set to discover a life of adventure until he gets a call from his girlfriend back home that they will have a baby. Robin is gutted but pursues his career as an architect in the UK as he begins to desire men and settles with one. When his partner is about to die, Robin meets Justin in a washroom and pursues him like a maniac. They both get together when Robin's partner dies of AIDS and they make a home in Dorset. One Sunday they decide to invite Justin's ex. Alex is jealous and heartbroken still over being dumped but is floored when he meets Robin's son, Danny. And thus begins a stellar madhouse comedy of a bunch of gay men who seem as though they are cast by a spell. They are delirious with desire, intent upon bitching about each other, knowing who has a better dick and how far the older-younger dynamics can work among gay men when one looks like their father. The book was short and had the perfect ingredients to sweep me into the characters's lives. I understand why many may have disliked the book and thought it bad because some plot points drag here and there and it can be confusing to concentrate when there are so many names being dropped in out of nowhere. But I chose to ignore and simply indulge in it for the clarity with which it confused dynamics among men; the tensions, jealousies, ways of speaking, modes of desire and the little pockets of love that still remain. Hollinghurst is that writer for me who always assures me of a good time. And I had one with this. I am already prepared with what next I'd of his. Quite soon.
May 16, 2018
Even the litter of pleasant prose fails to elevate this to anything but an inconsequential gay romp through the last quarter of the 20th century. This is my least favourite of Hollinghurst's books. I'm not sure what the titular spell – nor the point of it all – was, but it didn't cast its magic on me.
November 28, 2025
A well-written bore that casts gay men as, at best, two-dimensional.
The spots of racism - Hollinghurst can't write about a black person without making it explicit that they're black - are also uncomfortable, even for the '90s. We even get a penis joke about African men in there, towards the end. Nice.
As I say, though, the prose is gorgeous.
The spots of racism - Hollinghurst can't write about a black person without making it explicit that they're black - are also uncomfortable, even for the '90s. We even get a penis joke about African men in there, towards the end. Nice.
As I say, though, the prose is gorgeous.
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