Gleaming pictures of the past

If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt Affair, you’ll almost certainly be right. Once again, Hollinghurst explores British gay history by plunging us into haute bohemia over several decades of the 20th century. (A few years ago he told an interviewer that the main characters in his next book ‘will all be more or less heterosexual’: a plan that sounded pretty unlikely at the time and, seeing as this is his next book, was evidently abandoned.) Once again, he combines his broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis — and all in prose that manages to be both utterly sumptuous and utterly precise.

The novel opens in wartime Oxford, where a group of Christ Church students have spotted an unknown hunk in the rooms opposite. He is, it turns out, David Sparsholt, who’s due to be there for only a term before joining the RAF. He’s also engaged — although, as Hollinghurst readers will rightly suspect, this doesn’t mean that he’s not available for some man-on-man action.

In the next section, set in the mid-1960s, David is married with a 14-year-old son Johnny, through whose eyes we see the rest of the novel and who at this stage is suffering a (mostly) unrequited crush on a French schoolboy staying with the family. We then move to the early 1970s, where Johnny’s job as a picture restorer introduces him to his father’s former Oxford admirers, centred around the home of a gay art critic — and from there, to the exhilarating new sexual possibilities that London traditionally offers Hollinghurst’s leading men.

But by now we also know that Johnny’s father was imprisoned after a public scandal. Given that this is another Hollinghurst novel where the big events occur between the sections (his previous one, The Stranger’s Child was a first world war novel in which the first world war took place off-stage) the details of the eponymous Sparsholt Affair remain hazy.