[In the following review, Kemp lauds stylistic and thematic aspects of The Folding Star.]

Alan Hollinghurst's new novel is chock-a-block with visual artefacts: Symbolist paintings, still-lifes, pensive Virgins, country scenes, portraits, murals, etchings, engravings, waxen-looking historical tableaux, blackened Victorian allegories, charcoal drawings, townscapes, seascapes. The most significant of them, done by a turn-of-the-century Belgian painter, Edgard Orst, exhibit an imagination dwelling on the same patterns, but rendering them in different tones.

Not dissimilarly, The Folding Star reproduces—with one major new motif and pervasive alterations of shading and highlight—the distinctive configurations of Hollinghurst's first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988). That novel silhouetted a gay man against a city that was graphically portrayed and vividly populated. So does this book. But, this time, the setting isn't the flamboyant London of the early 1980s but a Flemish backwater in the early 1990s. The spring and summer of the earlier novel are replaced by autumn and winter. Instead of a wealthy, glamorous young swaggerer round the metropolis, this book takes as its narrator a slightly pudgy, bespectacled older man, teaching English in a silted-up museum city, whose carillons, stepped gables, canals, swans and Memling paintings suggest Bruges. As yet unheard-of in the hectic homosexual milieux of The Swimming-Pool Library, AIDS and AZT now cast shadows.

This more twilight atmosphere is appropriate to The Folding Star, in that the novel counterpoints two fin-de-siècle fixations: the 1890s obsession of Edgard Orst, with a flame-haired actress who inspired the Sphinxes, Herodiases and other hieratic temptresses on his crepuscular canvases, and the 1990s obsession of an English tutor, Edward Manners, with his seventeen-year-old pupil, Luc Altidore.

Rather as William Beckwith, who narrated The Swimming-Pool Library, gradually uncovered secrets from the life of a figure of a much earlier generation, so here Manners becomes increasingly acquainted with Orst's past. The perversities, betrayals and culminating Nazi murderousness he learns of parallel the perversities, betrayals and culminating racist murderousness that came to light in the earlier book.

Orst is, though, primarily seen as an instance of an infatuated imagination, projecting his enthralment with his actress-lover—sometimes powerfully, sometimes absurdly, sometimes repellently—into his art. A later, homosexual counterpart to him, Manners does the same thing in his story. Captivated by blond, clever Luc, he alternates spasms of swoony besottedness ("We had never walked up a flight of stairs together before") with fantasy sessions in which they enjoy fabulous sex. A rather creepy roguishness towards the teenager he is twice as old as ("a feeling of being linked with him in some wonderful delinquency") works itself up into heated contortions.

Salaciously salivating over his love-object's name ("Luc's cul a dream palindrome—the two round cheeks of it and the lick of the s between"), Manners can occasionally resemble a gay variant on Humbert Humbert ("Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth"). Not merely a teacher but uncommonly entranced with school and schoolboys—he's charmed to find the room he rents overlooks a boys' college; the novel's central section is a lengthy, vivid flashback to his boarding-school days—he's revealed as, behind the subtlety and sophistication he elsewhere displays, in some respects still puerile.

What makes his narrative engrossing, despite this, isn't its twists of plot or the closing revelations that here, as in The Swimming-Pool Library, retrospectively re-slant events. It's the honesty about himself and his life that Manners admirably maintains. Openness to and about a diverse range of experience intensely vivifies this book.

As its title indicates—compacting together connotations of "embrace … implosion … something ancient but evanescent"—The Folding Star highlights doomed rapture. But more mundane manifestations of sexuality are arranged about it, too. Though Manners's fervour for Luc keeps hazing into a blur of bedazzlement, there's sharp-eyed perceiving of different physical, emotional and psychological elements melded into sexual attraction in the sections of the novel concerned with his other affairs (again like Beckwith, he has two regular lovers along with numerous temporary pleasurings). Like Hollinghurst's earlier novel, this book excels at near-documentary portrayal—lusty, sardonic, beguiled, unillusioned—of the public and private rituals, routines, excitements and disappointments of gay life. Like that book too, it swings between rarefied aesthetic satisfactions and thrills of a more fundamental kind.

Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings. Along with strong responsiveness to male physique and appeal goes informed receptivity to art: Manners is as adept at appraising Old Masters as he is at sizing up young men. With his urbane, ironic—rather Jamesian—disposition, he's also an ideal figure to do justice to the book's scenes of slyly funny social comedy.

Ranging from romantic obsession to anonymous sex in the undergrowth, from amused observation of a dinner-party to submersion in the symbolic shadows of nineteenth-century Decadent painting, making detours down literary and musical by-ways of the twentieth century, inspecting Gothic architecture and gay bars, two-way mirrors and differences between the placings of the eyes in Flemish and Italian Renaissance pictures, The Folding Star is a novel of considerable breadth. What gives it its depth is the candour, wit, sensuous immediacy and melancholy intelligence applied to it.