"The Sparsholt Affair," by Alan Hollinghurst

    Hollingshurst is clearly one of the UK's finest writers, with all his novels focussing on the lives of gay males. The writing is always of a very high order--critics rave so frequently about his sentences that a discussion of the book I heard recently started with the moderator saying, 'let's not talk about the sentences...'
    There is something rather strange about this latest novel, which spans the history of Britain, from 'the War,' as we still talk about it, through to the advent of gay marriage, the ubiquity of mobile phones, internet dating sites for gay males, openly gay clubs and bars, and other major changes in social mores. But not much is actually made of the many momentous changes in the lives of gay males over this long stretch of years. The illegality of homosexual acts up to 1966, when the laws were abolished, is briefly mentioned, but with little elaboration as to the effect this had on gay males. There is only a brief allusion to the AIDs epidemic. Almost as an afterthought, well after the event, there is mention of a gay marriage at Chelsea Town Hall. But as we move forward from 1940 to the present day, in a series of episodes, with the dates not always clear, it is apparent that these changes and events are taking place.
     At the centre of the novel is "The Affair" of the title. David Sparsholt is somehow involved in a scandal involving a Clifford Haxby and an MP. There is some unexplained background of political and financial corruption, but the focus was on the rather mysterious sexual relations among the three men. And two years before homosexual acts between consenting adults became legal, David Sparsholt was sent to prison. "The Affair" is all over the newspapers, and its resonance is always connected with the name Sparsholt.
    We start in 1940 in Oxford, in Christ  Church college where David Sparsholt--a jock, in the US terminology--is ogled by other students, including Evert Dax, who is gay, and Freddy Green who is not, as he lifts weights in his lighted room. Evert does have sex with him on one occasion. The novel opens with an account of these carrying-ons in Oxford by Freddy Green in a memoir written for the Cranley Gardens Memoir Club, which was "found among Freddy Green's papers after his death," but not read at the Club.
    The Oxford section is about one sixth of the novel, and much that occurs in it is echoed in various ways as we move forward to focus on Johnny, the son of David Drummond and his wife Conny, who makes her first appearance in the Oxford section. After Art School, Johnny works for an art dealer as a restorer and framer, and one day delivers a picture to the house of Evert Dax, where the Cranley Memoir Club is meeting. And obviously the son of David Sparsholt is welcomed by the Evert Dax circle.
     And the novel follows Johnny, with a wide variety of developments from a teenager in love with a French boy Bastien on holiday in Cornwall, through a number of both failed and successful relationships. We have a lot of detail about his career as a successful portrait painter, his role as a father (yes), and his ultimate arrival into his contented sixties. All very well done, all the psychology well-worked out, whether Johnny is dancing in a frenzy in a gay night club, or working out how to paint portraits of a family of four.
     Now I just cop out--a very good read. It's long, and I thought there were periods of tedium and felt the urge to say 'get on with it,' but for the most part it held my interest to end--in fact, I was a bit disappointed when I realized I was at the end. And the writing is of such a high quality.