“I've developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter's,” I added, and watched him scowl. “I'm following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.”
I haven't read Alan Hollinghurst before, and as The Sparsholt Affair began, I thought I was in for a real treat: The first section – set at Oxford in 1940, with gowns and blackouts and fire watches on the ramparts – was wonderfully atmospheric, and as a group of young men yearn and strive for physical closeness (the narrator with his girlfriend, Jill; two other male characters hoping to catch the eye of the young Adonis across the quad who lifts weights in his underthings), I was yearning with them; this section ticked all my boxes of interest and narrative tension. The next section, however, skips ahead twenty or so years, switching to the perspective of the thirteen-year-old son of Sparsholt (who was the original Adonis), and while there's atmosphere and yearning of a different kind, the shift drained the tension of the original section. The next three sections continue to skip ahead ten or twenty years at a time, staying from the perspective of this son, Jonathan, and the plot never regained the pleasure of the original bit for me. An uneven experience, but with something interesting to say in the end – I would definitely read Hollinghurst again. (Note: Despite being published last fall in the UK, I read an ARC of the upcoming North American release, and as such, quotes may not be in their final forms. In my copy, Jonathan's red Volvo becomes a “Vulva” in later chapters, and I wondered whether this was a spellcheck issue or an inside joke. Either way, it highlights the dangers of quoting from an ARC, which I can't resist.)
He expected the old man to come round at some point to the Sparsholt Affair, but he never did, perhaps simply because it didn't involve him or anyone he knew personally, and was, besides, a hideous balls-up, of the kind that Chalmers himself, for all his much wilder adventures, had been far too clever to get caught up in.In the foreground of the plot, the original group of Oxford friends go on to live successful lives after doing their duties in WWII, and when Jonathan grows up and becomes an artist, his path intersects with some of those who had known his father at school. At some point, the father was involved in a scandal – known infamously as the titular Sparsholt Affair – and while details are sketchy, it involved crooked land deals, male prostitutes, and disgraced politicians. Sparsholt himself went to jail over the matter, and despite being an openly gay man himself, Jonathan wasn't close enough to his father to ever ask him just what went on. And in the background, there's a lovely evolution of the gay scene. There are no activists in this story, characters simply take the dominant ethos for granted – so in the beginning, we have the closeted friends at Oxford being careful not to let the Censor discover what they're up to; Jonathan comes out in a world with shadowy gay clubs and partners beginning to live openly together, finding ways to make babies; Jonathan himself marries his longtime partner at one point; and in the end, when he becomes a widower, Jonathan discovers the current world of debauched raves and Grinder and self-made porn on Instagram. Over everything, as the world around him becomes more permissive, Jonathan feels the weight of his father's scandal; even as society eventually moves on and people need to look up the Sparsholt Affair in Wikipedia to remind themselves what it was all about.
"I shouldn't tell you this, it's what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair...Seriously, though, I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life if you let it.”What I liked about this in retrospect was the shadowy nature of the “Sparsholt Affair” itself: we have no idea how the elder Sparsholt was actually involved in the scandal – he did go to jail, but this was long after homosexual activity itself would get you sent away – but because there was a mention of “male prostitutes” at the bust-up, the whole thing is remembered as a sex scandal instead of a dodgy land deal. (Naturally, this made me thing of the “Profumo Affair”: who doesn't remember that, if it's thought of at all today, as a sex thing instead of a Cold War spy thing?) And then this manufactured uncertainty made me think **spoiler** What if the elder Sparsholt never had any gay flings in the first place? His activities at Oxford are only reported by Freddie in the first section, in papers he never published, and as he went on to become a novelist, that narrative just might be a bit of wish fulfillment for his friends. Or, Evert might have actually said “I had him” after an evening with Sparsholt, but that doesn't make it true. This uncertainty, and the way that rumours can, indeed, colour one's entire life, elevated the whole for me. **end/spoiler**
This was just a dead man's face, which the light of scandal might play over as readily as that of acclaim. He thought the convention was to kiss the dead parent on the brow, but a sense that that wasn't his father's style deterred him, and he felt he wouldn't regret not having done so. He took out his pocketbook, moved the visitor's chair to the head of the bed and sat down and drew him, a rapid but careful and observant sketch, five minutes' intent work. He thought, this is what we get to do. He couldn't remember for the life of him what colour his father's eyes had been.A final note: Hollinghurst writes continually of missing fathers – physically or emotionally – and young gay men who are gerontophiles (some may have been looking for Sugar Daddies, but others do seem to be turned on by the greybeards), and I don't know if he meant to have the two conflated in the readers' minds; but don't see how it couldn't have been intentional. In the end, I loved the first section, but didn't find Jonathan himself to be interesting enough to carry off the rest of the book. I appreciated the subtle evolution of the gay scene, and the progression of society's attitudes, in the background; loved that Jonathan bore his father's scandal upon his shoulders even long after others had forgotten about it; this book has much of interest to say. I'm conflicted between three and four stars, but will feel generous in a rounding up.
