The Folding Star
Alan Hollinghurst
Vintage pbk, 422 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)
Said to have run How Late It Was, How Late a close second in last year's Booker race, Alan Hollinghurst's second novel is certainly no less controversial a book than the Kelman. It follows the resonantly named Edward Manners to Belgium to tutor two pupils in English. Quickly though, Manners' professionalism turns to love for one of his students, the beautiful and bad 17-year-old Luc, and the teacher's life becomes a colourful blur of gay bars and increasingly obsessive passion.
Hollinghurst's debut, The Swimming Pool Library, was rightfully applauded as an honest, pre-AIDS celebration of queer life; The Folding Star is altogether a more intricate and ultimately more satisfying work. Hollinghurst's language is both spirited and vulgar, but never at the expense of its humour or its essential literary quality. Edward is an affable narrator, but one rounded enough to be driven by undeniable appetites that allow him to rob Luc's underwear for his own unsavoury purposes. The sex in here is vigorous and energetic and rough and yet avoids collapsing the narrative into the simply prurient; as the story shifts up a gear in the later stages, so does the wealth of sweaty detail the author holds for our inspection. This is not a book that invites a prudish reception.
And nor, whatever the quality of the writing, would it hold the attention for all of its long, dense 400-plus pages without something to bolster the narrative. Paul Echevin - father to Edward's other pupil, the stout Marcel - is director of a museum on the outskirts of town dedicated to the work of obscure fin-de-siecle Belgian painter Edgard Orst. As Edward helps catalogue the Symbolist, he feels drawn to the strange, twilight world of the man and his own obsessive love for the tragic Jane. There are resonances for all the principles in these strands that speak of long harboured guilt and betrayals stretching back as far as the country's Nazi past.
The author's grasp of character is compelling, from Edward's alternation between confused lover and sexual predator, to the cool, sardonic arrogance of the obscure object of his desire. Floating around in the background Hollinghurst paints others like Luc's best friend Patrick, the overbearing would-be girlfriend, Sibylle, and Edward's sometime live-in French Moroccan lover Cherif with sufficient subtly and wit to lift them wide of the page. Only Marcel remains curiously elusive.
The real strength of The Folding Star comes though from its author's luscious watchfulness. A brief central section takes Edward back to England for a funeral and reflections on his own stuttering sexual awakening that bring weight and tone to the comfortable adult he has grown into. Tellingly Hollinghurst is as at home in the details of a small Flemish town as he is with the social etiquette of cruising and gay pick-ups. There seems more than a ring of truth in Edward's part-lust, part-disgust at the sexually rapacious Matt, stealing boys' underwear at the local baths to peddle to his eager phone-sex clients.
Ironic, slyly witty and, with an open mind, horny as hell, The Folding Star is a highly recommended triumph of intellectual poise and convincing, alluring story-telling.