Reviews: "The Line of Beauty" and British "Queer as Folk"

[x_los]

The Line of Beauty could well be my favorite book, if it weren't uncomfortably good. I didn't read it in the long sprawling gush that its weighty, atmospheric, absorbing prose seemed to command by right, but in jagged pieces--twenty one day, two hundred a few weeks later--to spare myself at intervals from its relentless perfection. The story of Nick Guest, a recent Oxford graduate, gay and naive, being enfolded by a rich and powerful Tory family and their set, is poised on the edge of dramatic irony. You know, in a way Nick cannot, that he's on the precipice of the AIDS crisis, that the people he's connected himself to fundamentally oppose him and will inevitably reject him. That he's a rube. That the oft-reoccurring Line of Beauty cannot protect him--that beauty isn't salvatory, cannot be enough.

The prose is so perfect, replete with "Drummer Hodge" a la History Boys instances of exquisite, transcendent understanding between writer and reader. Catherine's depression and medicated troughs and crests are as perfect a depiction of mental illness as I've seen.

As to British "Queer as Folk," god do I wish I'd seen this before and instead of the drawn out, tedious, soft-core porn American rendition. It was like the interference you get learning German when you're an English speaker who's already learned a second language. My grammar for how the show should go was already established and wrong. I knew what was going to happen and knew different versions of all the character names. But the original show resolves plot lines that took three American seasons in three hours of footage, and I don't feel I'm missing out on the packing-material bulking-up plot lines the American QaF distracted me with.

The writing was noticeably better, the characterization less annoying, the music Placebo-tastic. Our final central couple is a much better idea. The ending is a bit hammy and possibly naff: why are we in Arizona sloppily indulging the underdog fantasy of turning physical force back against the homophobes who intimidate you? We might've left it with out po-mo goodbye to Canal Street. Thought I do like the 'where are they now' shots and the remake's implication that Manchester is pretty much Philadelphia. And the many Doctor Who jokes: I had fun.

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I never watched the American version precisely because I had seen the original British one and couldn't imagine what a remake/rewriting could add. It's Rusty in fine form, which also means with a definite limit beginning and ending. (In the audio commentary for the s1 finale, which was recorded in 2002 - i.e. before New Who - the actors can't manage the names of all the actors who played the Doctor anymore (they talk about this a few minutes before the scene comes up) - and ask RTD whether he can, whereupon he says indignantly "of course" and rattles them of.)

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Exactly, this and Second Coming show me that, lameass Voyage of the Damned or no, the man really can write very very well. And to be fair, I can't think of anything exclusive to the American version I REALLY loved and wish the original had included?

[evilawyer.livejournal.com]

I shall have to seek out this book.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

what you say about nick and his tory-ness...

he's connected himself to fundamentally oppose him and will inevitably reject him. That he's a rube.

i don't think is true. i think they don't actually oppose him at all, he is genuinely liked and his homosexuality is deemed insignificent. the problem is that gerald is angry at nick for an entirely different reason i.e. his failure to take care of cat - so he latches onto something that he doesn't think of as personally offensive (personal-ness being the cause of his real anger), but which society hates in order to shove emphasis onto the greater, rather than the particular.

i find the whole tory/80s thing very difficult, as did the world - with people arguing that the book glamourised the tories and other people claiming it demonised them. i think, actually, that it's more what nick says about james (i've just found my presentation which pointed me in the direction of this particular quotation):

“he would have been very kind to us… and we wouldn’t realise until much later on that he’d seen right through us”.

what nick should have realised is not that they would reject him for being gay, but that gerald (seen in the opening pages in front row of the party photograph) would not tolerate his career being destroyed.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Def. worth it!

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I was thinking less on the level of the family as individuals, and more in terms of them as a class/political aggregate? While as /people/, these individuals are all fine with him, he's definitely here for /their world/ as well as /the family/, and their world isn't *for* him.

I'd hardly accuse it of doing either? As people the Torry's he's most concerned with are very human, and I think the book does a good job of showing that the problem lies in the deforming power of the larger social structure they inhabit and participate in rather than their *personal* deficiencies.

I do like that James quote and the element of foreshadowing, but I feel Gerald's betrayal is at least as much about the destruction of his family life (with Cat in the most dramatic sense, his marriage/relationship with a wife he does seem to love, and the trust/respect of his son) as much as it is the failure of his political career, which is in some ways more a billionaire'e pet project than his full identity?