This book has Adult content, do not read if easily offended
That's the warning over with.
This was serialised in the UK some years back, and I caught most of the programme. (It was obviously aired after the 9pm watershed, due to it's content.) However the television adaptation had obviously dumbed the story down quite a bit.
The story is about Will, grandson of a peer of the realm, who is comfortably off, and gay. It follows his activities over a period of around 6 months, I think. As the story is not placed in time until the very end I was trying to work out when it was set, references place it in the 80s sometime, but obviously not too late on, as Will's encounters are prolific at times, and there is no mention of caution due to AIDS. In the last chapter the Falklands conflict is mentioned as a recent occurrence, so the book is set in 1982 or 1983. In reading this book, you could be forgiven for thinking that there are no straight people in London, but I guess that is just reflecting the world in which Will lives. Some of the passages were a little too graphic for me, but I knew that there would be very descriptive passages before I started reading. (I have just found in one of the press quotes that the book is set in 1983.)
Now the bumph from the back cover.
"The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context....A historic novel and a historic debut." Guardian
Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of priveldge and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Natwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.
The novel is one of the Vintage Blue series, books that all have a little risque-ness about them.
It is a more "literary" novel, and takes some time to "get into".