This book, which has been much-praised, goes to show that if your standing in the literary world is elevated enough, you can get away with writing a shit novel. I, too, love Alan Hollinghurst, but I cannot pretend this book is anything but awful.The storyline (in as much as there is one) concerns a father and son, both gay, and their lovers (present and former, which include some overlap). However, what should be a fizzy soap opera is merely banal and depressing. The novel seems rudderless – not...

Well disguised porn. Enthusiastically gay--the only type you can ever possibly find that's these things: dramatic, haunting, even poetic. Hollinghurst is incomparable; his niche is his very own.

This is the third of Hollinghurst’s four novels. And from what I can gather, the runt of the litter for quite a few of his readers. Not hard to see why, given what it followed: a brace of densely brilliant novels which permit us to richly inhabit the lyric sensibilities of two very sinuous and engaging first-person narrators (writers are still taking up the gauntlet of Lolita). The Spell, by contrast, flits among a circle of suggestively drawn but necessarily flatter London men. Hollinghurst doe...

Fiction. This book was so unpleasant I finished it in two days. I'd read a chapter, make a face, put the book down, and walk away. Later I'd find myself reading it again. It's a terrible book filled with gay men who are all cheating on each other. The really annoying thing is that it's quite well written so I kept reading even though I didn't want to. I wanted to see how it turned out, but I didn't care about any of the characters because they obviously didn't care about each other. So that was

Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker, may be one of the best novels I've read, among those novels in the Forsterian/Jamesian tradition, if such a tradition can exist. You know what I'm talking about. Novels about the lives of interesting people just a shade more fascinating and a shade better looking than average, whose lives fall in the midst of some greater sociopolitical moment. &c &c. What's surprising is how that incredible novel came out of the writer who produced t...

"Ultimately, The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart," informs the Goodreads blurb. No, that is exactly wrong. What it details is the restlessness of the gay penis. The novel is about a group of gay men in 1990s Britain, ranging in age from late teens to mid-forties, who desperately try to determine the size and shape of other men's cock-and-balls in whatever pants or underwear begarbs them.As such, the novel was about 70% too gay for me. It was like a dish that had two ingredien...

Hollinghurst's prose is as frank and lush as ever in The Spell. He reveals his characters' intricate internal worlds; to the reader's benefit, they are wonderfully observant and self-aware, yet they do not communicate well with one another. They withhold information; they hesitate to reveal themselves. It's not unexplored territory, but Hollinghurst deals brilliantly with characters' emotional and psychological lives. I'm left wondering if they're all happy with who and what they end up with, or...

Although to my mind Hollinghurst CAN'T write a truly bad book, this does not live up to the sheer brilliance of the other three of his I have read... it just didn't have the compulsive forward thrust that keeps one really interested. Am not sure exactly why that should be: the prose is gorgeous as always, and the characters are varied and for the most part interesting. But this short book took me longer to read than his magnum opus, The Line of Beauty, so something didn't quite click.

There's no denying that Hollinghurst is one of the most influential queer writers in the past 50 years and "The Spell" with its carefully crafted prose and intelligent exploration of gay life in the 90s proves why. Nevertheless, compared to the other two Hollinghurst books I have read, "The Swimming Pool Library" (which is great) and "The Line of Beauty" (which is a masterpiece), "The Spell" feels more like a throwaway work.It's quite a short novel and the characters don't have the usual depth I...

Wow, this book is bad. Nearly all the characters are hollow, superficial, empty... that doesn't make it easy to like them or even care about them (but maybe that's intentional... what do I know?). The Swimming-Pool Library wasn't anything special either, but this one is terrible.I was tempted to give The Spell two stars but that would be too harsh. In the end, it's just a gay variation of chick lit. No artistic value expected/required. Read it if you need to turn off your brain but stay

4 stars becuz of the extremely lengthy descriptions of environment.

Even the litter of pleasant prose fails to elevate this to anything but an inconsequential gay romp through the last quarter of the 20th century. This is my least favourite of Hollinghurst's books. I'm not sure what the titular spell – nor the point of it all – was, but it didn't cast its magic on me.

A somber narrated story about four men drifting and drinking. Not able to communicate, connect or imagine a future. Great characters. Well written.

Hollinghurst is a good writer. He writes well. I recommend Swimming Pool Library. But this book is very very boring, and I simply couldn’t care about these characters. A rare 1 star from me.

2.5/5 Sadly the gorgeous prose couldn’t make up for the unlikeable characters and feeble plot. Hollinghurst has some nice reflections but you have to slog through to find those golden nuggets.

"He clearly had no idea of the psychic shock, to someone like himself, of falling in love. Danny would be a great lover, that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians knew nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it." I really enjoyed the other Alan Hollinghurst book I read, The Swimming-Pool Library, but had two main criticisms when I'd finished it: one was that it was vastly over-written, and the other was that it was not over-plo

I was warned about this, so can I really complain?It's just not good. I can see what it tries to, but the skills weren't there yet. I hear that his later work is much better and I am looking forward to reading that.It's a strange glimpse into the upper middle class English country-side with a few trips into London night clubs. All the characters are gay men and it's about their interweaving relationships. At first that was actually entertaining to a degree, but as the story progressed everybody

Beautifully written story by Hollinghurst describes the loves and betrayals of 3 gay men. How each cope and their feelings toward each other as they meet on a weekend. Two are ex-lovers and we find a contrived weekend merely to compare loves. It's cruel and Justin is cruel. Robbin is hot. Alex is dumped and lonely.Hollinghurst manages to illicit emotions and feelings from the smallest things in life and encapsulate them and uses them to describe how a little stream, dust motes in the air all of

Every morning when Alex woke he thought of Danny; his thoughts emerged from the watery interview or vanishing railway-carriage of dreams, stumbled on for a few forgetful instances, pale and directionless, and then fled towards Danny in a grateful glow of remembered purpose. It was love, and all the day would be coloured by it. Or perhaps love was the primary thing, onto which the events of the day were transiently projected - that was how it seemed afterwards, when his memory gave back rather li...

This was another book I had abandoned out of sheer boredom. This time I finished the book, but the book was like eating oatmeal. Nothing wrong with oatmeal, it's hot and nourishing, but not exciting. The characters were unappealing and unlikeable. In truth, they were worse than oatmeal. On the whole the writing seemed accomplished but too many passages tried too hard. The effort in the writing translated into effort in reading. There seemed to be no joy in the act of writing. I confess the extre...

Alright, so the ending scene was a little silly and, as a whole, this book doesn't come close to the dizzying literary heights of The Line of Beauty. It is, however, a wonderful read. I love the way Hollinghurst evokes character and place and community, I love the awkward terrible sad sweet workings of the relationships he portrays, I love being dropped into a world in which nearly everyone is gay. (That 1 star review up there really bugs me - I can't understand why anyone looking for a fast pac...

Alan Hollinghurst writes lush, beautiful sentences about lush, beautiful men who spend lots of time staring hungrily at each other’s bodies and sleeping with each other’s boyfriends. Compared to his other novels, this one was a bit of a lightweight (definitely not the same caliber as either The Swimming-Pool Library or The Line of Beauty, both of which would probably make my top 25). But he’s such an amazingly astute observer of character that I didn’t even mind—and my god, what gorgeous prose.

Not nearly as good as The Line of Beauty, which is one of my all-time favorites, but still a pretty good book. Hollinghurst is probably my favorite author in the gay literature genre. His stories have great characters, and he is able to capture the most ordinary of interactions, and people's reaction to them, in such an insightful and authenticate way. If you haven't read him yet, I'd start with the Line of Beauty. It is a little dense, but totally worth it.

A novel for the Cucumber-Banana-Tofu generation: depressing. It doesn't offer any redemption either, which I find unnecessarily bleak and negative. Of course, this has nothing to do with the writing, which is quite wonderful, as has been since Hollinghurst's debut. I guess there is some point in all this, all these lies and backstabbing and disappointments... I just don't find them all that entertaining.

Being an avid Alan Hollinghurst fan I picked this up in the book tent at the recent Adelaide Writers Festival, where Hollinghurst was a guest speaker. As it was the only one of his novels I hadn’t read, buying it was a no brainer. Anything by AH has to be great, right? Wrong. This is not a great book. It’s not even a good one. It’s not much more than a gay bacchanalian romp through London and Dorset with a changing cast of characters who find it hard to focus their minds on anything other than e...

I have undertaken a project in the summer of 2018 to read all of the novels of Alan Hollinghurst in chronological order. The Spell (1998) was his third. Contemplate a novel that has not one protagonist but four. It seemed to me that Hollinghurst used four gay men—Robin, Justin, Alex (Justin’s ex), and Danny (Robin’s natural son by an American woman)—to make commentaries on gay manners and morals post-AIDS crisis. For example, on p. 179, during a trial separation, Robin had a lucid moment about h...

By the time The Spell was published in 1998, Alan Hollinghurst's previous two novels had established him as a stand-out, but highly literary, writer of the UK gay scene. This book moves the action along to the early nineties, when AIDS was less worrying and London's ecstasy-fuelled rave scene had developed a distinct gay branch line centred around Old Compton Street. The narrative moves between the spell of this dance music, the excitement of discovering ecstasy and the allure of new lovers. The...

It's unnerving to connect with a fictional character that shares several of your own traits...and your name. The Spell is a gay fantasy about four men - Robin, Justin, Danny and Alex - whose lives become entangled together. It's not so much a story concerned with plot as a character study of each of them; their contrasting reactions to love and they view the queer culture around them. Alex is probably as close to the main protagonist as he is the least connected to the other three and gets to ha...

Simply put, this novel is about four gay men and their relationships that are always in a state of falling apart or coming together. The prose is beautiful, and the main reason I picked up The Spell . Having never read Hollinghurst, I was excited to delve into one of his works and see what all the hype was about. Evidently, I picked the wrong novel. The characters are not just unlikable (which I could handle), they're entirely two-dimensional, propelled by the most basic of desires. There's no

This book seals it - Alan Hollinghurst is currently my favorite author. I could read him just to spend time in the eccentric London apartments and idyllic country cottages that fill his books, but what really draws me in is the way he takes the reader into the minds of his instrospective characters who are obsessed with understanding themselves and everyone else they encounter.The Spell is told from the viewpoint of four different men, each either spellbound by others or casting a spell on them....