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Review

The Spell is the much anticipated third novel by the author of The Swimming Pool Library. In this midsummer comedy of manners set in the English countryside, Alan Hollinghurst marries the sharp wit of Jane Austen to the elegant cynicism of Oscar Wilde, as he takes a stylish and sometimes wickedly funny look at human affairs of the heart. Here are the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover Justin, a would-be actor (and heir to a small fortune) increasingly disenchanted with the countryside; Robin's gay, attractive and dangerously volatile twenty-two-year-old son Danny; and Justin's former boyfriend Alex, whose life is unexpectedly transformed by a night of house music and a tab of ecstasy with Danny. As each falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the illusions of love, and of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life: the hunger for contact and the fear of commitment, the need for permanence and the continual disruptions of sex. Steeped in the sounds and sensations of a long summer in London, and in the depths of the English country, The Spell is by turns lyrical and farcical, skeptical and romantic. A truly wonderful book.