Gay life in England across the decades, from the 1960s to the pandemic, is captured with glowing intensity through an actor’s memories

In what has become one of the defining rhythms of contemporary literature, Alan Hollinghurst’s novels appear at spacious intervals of six or seven years, each a solid architectural structure holding within it fugitive emotions and pungent atmospheres, each managing restraint and amplitude in tandem, each to be read slowly for its craftsmanship and with a greedy plunge of the spoon into the deft social comedy, counterpointed settings, and irresistibly expressive detail.

The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) is firmly established as a modern classic, though The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker prize 20 years ago, is probably his best-known novel: a Jamesian study of sex, class and power in Thatcher’s Britain. Since then, The Stranger’s Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) have brought some of Hollinghurst’s most remarkable writing. Investigations of legacy and memory, they are structurally fascinating in their use of discontinuous stories side-stepping across generations. But some coherence ebbed away in the gaps, and the daringly blank Sparsholt lead characters, for whom other characters felt so much, exerted on me a less certain pull.