A review by quirkycynic
The Spell, by Alan Hollinghurst

2.0

"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?