[Woods is chief literary critic for the Guardian. In the review below, he lauds Hollinghurst's focus on and elegiac evocation of England, English society, and childhood in The Folding Star.]

A lot of people have noticed that Alan Hollinghurst's second novel [The Folding Star] is "beautifully written" of course—people now use this phrase very soothingly, as if it were the solution to a puzzle. Certainly, Hollinghurst's language, with its patrician roll, and its self-savouring languor, is worth keen attention; but the novel's real achievement is to have created a viable contemporary English prose, peachy with remembered glows, but not mopingly retrospective.

This is not a negligible or insular achievement. Post-war English fiction has, largely, been unable to tell convincing national epics; instead of English novels, we have novels of Englishness (most egregiously in Peter Ackroyd's work). Balzac called fiction "the secret history of nations", and Alan Hollinghurst seems to know this secret epic cannot be blustered into being. On the contrary, nationalism in art is like a medieval town: it radiates out-wards from a neglected centre.

The Folding Star begins foggily. Edward Manners, an old and seedily fatigued 33, arrives in a Bruges-like Flemish city. He is teaching English to two teenage boys, one of whom, the pure and fair Luc Altidore, he has fallen in love with. Edward is quickly inducted into the city's gay life, but the milieu seems too easy for Hollinghurst—Edward's round of bars and clubs seems a way of avoiding a necessary fattening of detail and theme. Initially, the book seems heavy and opaque. But it deepens slowly, and it soon teaches you to move at its own rich, slippered pace. The reader realises at length that this is a book that must dawdle, for the novel's dreamy theme is the elusiveness of romance, the elsewhere of childhood, the ungraspability of memory.

Luc is fabulously unattainable, and his unattainability slowly comes to represent (though this is too forceful a word) the glowing blank of Edward's own childhood. The impossibility of declaring love inflates the agony: "I felt my throat streaming, pulsing like a dove's with unspoken 'I love you's." Luc is unattainable not just for numerous practical reasons, but because he is the spirit of innocence. At one moment, Edward recalls seeing Luc's bedroom for the first time—"how young it all still looked, and how unguarded, and hence reproachful". Reproachful, because innocence is always a reproach to corruption, and Edward is undeniably corrupt. His corruption is not just the murderous, obliterating lust he hoards for Luc; it is the corruption of no longer being innocent.

This is the elegiac corridor through which Hollinghurst's lovely words swim like dust in sunlight; and it is not hard to hear their Larkinian music. In Hollinghurst's "how young it all still looked, and how unguarded …" we are reminded of Larkin's poem "Maiden Name": "How beautiful you were, and near, and young". It is in the book's middle section, when Edward returns to his childhood town, Rough Common, just south of London, that the book finds its secret pivot and rockingly swells. Edward has returned for a funeral, and recalls his lost childhood—the summery boredom of youth.

Late in the novel, Edward, trying to keep himself awake, recites half-remembered poems to himself. Suddenly the book delivers itself of its Larkinian theme of memory and elegiac betrayal:

I tried to remember the whole of poems I'd once learned by heart … but memory was tarnished, words were spotted over, image blurred into image … When they faltered I left them and went drowsily towards the mirage they had conjured up, of summer dusks, funny old anecdotes, old embarrassments that still made me burn, boys' cocks and kisses under elms that had died with boyhood's end.

Kisses under elms that had died with boyhood's end—the softened syntax and phrasing is almost shamelessly English (though one shouldn't miss the slyness with which Hollinghurst slips "boys' cocks" into this pastoral bed). The novel's great achievement is to nuzzle this theme without rubbing it too hard. Edward remembers, for example, a family ritual—how, every summer, they would open the windows, close the curtains, and watch Wimbledon on television. Occasionally, one could hear a plane—"the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above". The whole experience seemed "an English limbo of light and shade, near and far, subtly muddled and displaced."

In some intangible but exquisite way, the novel's prose actually enacts this English limbo—it basks drowsily, it has its own kind of sonic wallow. Hollinghurst partly does this by avoiding the fetish of detail and choosing instead the mellower and more abstract approximateness of adjectives. And stunning adjectives these are—a first kiss, the mouths "open and sour with need"; "the loose purr of a car over cobbles"; "the mackintosh-scented gloom" of a tent's interior; a ski-jacket's "whispering cocoon", and on and on. There is something dreamy about this adjectival conjuring, and at length the novel's Flemish town—at one point likened to "a city in a book of hours"—becomes a kind of dream city. Indeed, the novel's language floats beautifully away into the passionate reticence of all romance. And this is also the passionate reticence, the forceful hesitation of true art—this novel proves so gladdeningly.