The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst – the work of a master

Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, The Sparsholt Affair, opens in Oxford during the second world war and ends in London in 2012. As with its predecessor, The Stranger’s Child (2011), much of the action takes place offstage, in the interstices between chapters. The chapters themselves are spent watching as these events make their repercussions felt in the lives of Hollinghurst’s rich cast of characters. This is a book about gay life, about art, about family, but most of all it’s about the remorseless passage of time.

The 1940 section of the book is narrated by a bright but not quite brilliant undergraduate called Freddie Green. He has a circle of luminous friends at Oxford, among them the artist Peter Goyle and the louche Evert Dax, the son of a prominent novelist. If the opening section of The Stranger’s Child doffed its cap to EM Forster and Henry James, the line between tribute and pastiche never quite resolved, this is Hollinghurst showing that he can do an Oxford novel as well as Waugh. He’s wonderful on the “beautiful delay” of university life, on the cloisters and the quadrangles, tentative intimacies building between friends and lovers.

We first meet David Sparsholt in “that brief time between sunset and blackout when you could see into other people’s rooms”. Freddie, Peter and Evert look over towards the handsome new student, with his “glorious head, like a Roman gladiator”. As we get to know Sparsholt, it strikes us that he’s not a typical Hollinghurst figure. He claims to have no time for reading, is studying engineering, engaged to the sensible Connie, and sees Oxford as a regrettable interlude before he can join the RAF. We soon recognise, though, that while Sparsholt may lack poetry, he’s not the strait-laced square that at first he seemed.

The book’s second section opens on a Sparsholt family holiday in the early 1960s. This leaping forward in time is a slightly unsettling dynamic, familiar from The Stranger’s Child (and from 2004’s Man Booker-winning The Line of Beauty). There’s an inevitable feeling of sorrow that comes with the end of each section – I’d have been happy with a whole novel set amid the dreaming spires. In each new narrative world we have to act as sleuths, working out what has happened in the years we’ve skipped over, establishing where our sympathies now lie, what has been gained and lost.

We soon gather the facts about us. Sparsholt had a good war, married Connie, is now a wealthy industrialist. He has a son, Johnny, whose third-person perspective we inhabit for this section and most of the rest of the novel. There are some lovely adolescent passages in which Johnny fantasises over his French exchange, Bastien. David seems tightly wound and reserved, only happy when in the company of his friend, Clifford, who (with his wife Norma) is also on the holiday.

Then, and again in the gap between chapters, the “Sparsholt affair” itself occurs. It would be a spoiler to reveal too much here, but the date – 1966 – is crucial, coming just before the decriminalisation of homosexuality the following year. The next chapter takes place in the 1970s of rolling blackouts and three-day weeks. The grown-up Johnny Sparsholt is gay, dyslexic, the owner of a fine mane of hair. Through his work as a picture restorer, he finds himself increasingly drawn to Evert Dax’s home in Cranley Gardens. It’s here that a society called the Memo Club meet, friends from Oxford who turn obsessively over the events of their own shared past.

As one would expect of Hollinghurst, the greatest prose stylist writing in English today, this is a book full of glorious sentences, perhaps his most beautiful novel yet. During a blackout, we read: “Outside, the street lights were glowing at half-power, arrested in the dim early mauve of their sequence. People peered quickly at each other as they passed from shadow to shadow, in doubt, and then brief solidarity.” Later, Johnny looks out of a Chelsea window over the Thames: “Beyond the traffic, between the plane trees, lay the grey expanse of the river, the cold wellings and streakings of its currents.” Hollinghurst is so good on “the teasing oddity and secret connectedness of London life” as Johnny (and the reader) is drawn deeper and deeper into the clandestine worlds of the city.

We realise that this, like its predecessor (and, indeed, Hollinghurst’s first novel, the exquisite The Swimming Pool Library), is a story about two generations of gay men, a tale that turns on the pivot of 1967. The last two sections of the book are called Losses and Consolations, each word carrying its own ironic edge. It’s about subterranean narratives of gay life, some of which bubble to the surface, others remaining for ever concealed. We follow Johnny Sparsholt in and out of love, witness him becoming a father (he donates sperm to a lesbian friend), see him happily settled, bereaved, a successful artist, a sixtysomething adrift in the world of online dating. We watch as the scandal of the Sparsholt affair slowly fades. There’s always something elegiac about the movement of time in a Hollinghurst novel, but here it feels less bleak than the vast emptiness at the end of The Line of Beauty, the bitchy literary narrowing at the close of The Stranger’s Child.

Evert Dax’s father, AV, scarcely features in this novel, but he’s important nonetheless. He’s an “unshakably serious” author, admired without being enjoyed (even by his son). The Sparsholt Affair is a rebuke to that kind of writing. This is an unashamedly readable novel, one that goes out of its way to please; indeed it feels occasionally like Hollinghurst is trying to house all the successful elements of his previous books under the roof of one novel. It’s funnier, more warm-hearted, less waspish than any of his books so far, but still undoubtedly the work of a master.