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Extending the gay narrative

Gay literature may have lost that'unique interest' but homosexuality remains a volatile subject politically, British author Alan Hollinghurst tells Gargi Gupta as he discusses his work and the deepening global intolerance

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Novelist Alan Hollinghurst won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty
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There's something very British about Alan Hollinghurst, and it's not just his nationality. It's a quality that comes through in the way he speaks - polite, self-deprecating, a little old world in his bearing. He's also good-humoured, agreeing to meet with journalists on the sidelines of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival despite being more than a little under the weather from exposure to the cold and dust of Jaipur in January.

He'd just finished writing a new novel – Sparsholt Affair – due in October. Urged to reveal more, he demurred: "When you finish a book, you don't quite know what it's about until you give the first interviews. Then you sort of accept what emerges...as the truth perhaps." He gave in, however, to reveal that it's a "rather too long book" and like his last novel, The Stranger's Child, covers a wide time span, starting in 1940 and ending in 2013, and "is partly about a great scandal and the effects it has on various people".

It'll also, knowing Hollinghurst's oeuvre, be about the gay experience. For all Hollinghurst's fiction thus far have foregrounded stories about male homosexuals, mostly from upper-class, aristocrat backgrounds. Stranger's Child, for instance, is about the life and loves, and posthumous fame of a poet called Cecil Valence who died in the World War I, and the shifting critical reception to his homosexuality. The Line of Beauty, his best-known novel, perhaps because it won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, told the story of a young gay man in 1980s Britain, set among the hypocrisies of a wealthy family he stays with, the rising conservatism in the political sphere with Margaret Thatcher, and the ever present danger of AIDS.

Openly gay himself, Hollinghurst's novels have the immediacy of personal feeling, evoking the stigma that dogged young gays like him in the 1970s and 1980s, the stratagems of secrecy that they were forced to adopt. Surely, the world of gays is very different around him now? "We're very fortunate," agreed Hollinghurst. "But I have young friends from Cameroon and parts of Africa who've had to seek asylum in Britain because they're in danger of their lives if they stay in their homeland. So there is deepening intolerance in many parts of the world. And with the great swing to the Right which is going on in much of world politics, one wonders how immutable are the hard-won rights which had seemed established for ever. It (homosexuality) remains a volatile subject politically."

Wasn't the disquietude surrounding gayness good for the imagination – it gave rise to all his five novels and three short-story collections. In the present atmosphere of acceptance, what gay narratives remain to be told? "It's no longer a thing being a gay novelist. It's no longer a subject in the way it was intensely a subject in the '80s and '90s. Gay literature existed as a definable genre of some urgency and interest during that period. It has lost that unique interest," he said with a precise, yet tentative fumble for words.

"The novel," especially this novelist he emphasised, pointing to himself, "needs tension. I think that's why I have tended to go back and look at earlier periods when being gay was much more difficult. And had the angst and the frisson about the secret codes and all that. It was so much more exciting in the old days."

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