The Spaces of the Thatcherite Body: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Will Self’s Dorian

Abstract

In the previous chapter I examined the problematic notion in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane of becoming British, in the Thatcherite sense, through the transformation of Nazneen’s domestic space from council-supported prison to a space of commercial production. In this chapter I turn to Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004) and Will Self’s Dorian (2002) as they link together, and trouble, the varied representations of space, consumption, and identity that I have focused on throughout my analysis of Thatcherite urban spaces. In addressing how Hollinghurst’s novel reveals the contradictory nature of the Thatcherite urban space, I shall focus on his representation of the Lloyd’s Building in London and of his character MP Gerald Fedden’s domestic spaces in a way that illustrates the complexities of Stuart Hall’s processes of identity as they are formed in and through the spaces of capital. Further, Hollinghurst’s representation of the figure of Thatcher as an object to be consumed provides a kind of foil to figures such as Tommy in Trainspotting, who ends up cast aside by the exclusive consumerism of Thatcherism, or Chanu in Brick Lane, who is eventually driven out of England by his own nostalgic constructions of English identity. What becomes clear in Hollinghurst’s text is that the figure of Thatcher herself is also caught up in the very consumptive nationalism that Sinclair castigates; as a result, the way in which she is popularly understood and consumed is deeply tied to such notions.