[In the review below, Hollander provides a mixed assessment of The Folding Star.]

It is odd that nothing more in the way of an aesthetic has emerged from our fin de siècle than those cod modes designated by the drab prefixes post- or de-. The last end-of-century produced the movements of Symbolism and Decadence, from which emerged the modern sensibility. In The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst tips his hat to them, while enlisting their help to build an aesthetic and, indeed, an aestheticism for our time.

A large part of that aesthetic is homosexuality, of a particular kind. Like the similar narrating "I" of Hollinghurst's debut novel, The Swimming Pool Library, Edward Manners—the hero of his second—seesaws between affectless cruising and an obsessional yearning for a non-negotiable love-object, again an adolescent.

Whereas the earlier hero was an aristocratic golden boy, a swimmer in all elements, Edward is bespectacled, dark, 33, running to fat and possessed of a distancing erudition—a step on towards that portrait that lurks in the Hollinghurst attic. More monomaniacal, nay hysterical, in his pursuit of a fetishised beloved, he embodies the severance of emotion from carnality; a gay version of the Madonna vs whore sort of love much favoured by the Decadents.

We meet him on the evening of his arrival in an historic Belgian city (probably Bruges) where after a vain shot at a heterosexual labourer, he lands in the gay bar where much of the novel will revolve. By page ten, he is busy with speedy fast-food sex, an activity stilled by the revelation of the two-way mirror in his hotel room. This is a city of secrets, of betrayals, of grey moodiness, a sort of hyperbolic England where Edward is both spy and spied-upon. It is a correlative for his dandyism, which throws on the peacockery of lush but "finical" (a favourite word) prose as a means not only of display but also of concealment.

The hyper-intelligent Edward, a writer manqué, has come to this country to give English conversation lessons to two school-boys whose reported English, in one case, is perfect. One of the boys is Luc, a "blond Aztec" whose photo-graph has already determined his teacher's infatuation; the other an unattractive asthmatic called Marcel (Proust Ha Ha Ha: one of the many referential or anagrammatic sideshows).

Both boys can lay claim to Belgium's great Symbolist flowering. Luc's ancient family (descended directly, somehow, from the Virgin Mary) published Maeterlinck and Verhaeren; Marcel's father has more or less inherited the curatorship of the local museum consecrated to Edgard (equals Edward) Orst, a Symbolist painter and "aesthete par excellence" whose devotion to his dead (female) lover took on ever more elaborate and perverted forms.

While Edward makes merry with rough trade, his unrequited lust for Luc ascends to a screech of self-abasement. Ranging secretly about the boy's rooms, he tastes his inamorato's toothbrush, sniffs his bed and paws through the laundry basket, stealing some Calvins (which he wears). With a porn-merchant lover, he breaks into the house beside the one where Luc and the others of his trio of shimmering jeunes gens en fleurs are holidaying, training binoculars on the 17-year-old as he sunbathes, his excitement relieved by a bit of friendly masturbation from his pal.

One imagines that Edward is doomed never to fuck Luc, but in one graphic scene we at long last get a glimpse of tenderness and real eroticism, in which response out-weighs the anatomical detail. But even here is a disjunction: the narrative abruptly devolves from the present to the past, and Edward's consummation is prefaced by grief for the "desolate undertow of success".

Fuir, là-bas fuir!, as Mallarmé wrote. Anywhere but here, any time but now, anyone but you: the great beautifying No. From the Symbolists and the Decadents through to Proust, the mode was escape, the destination the unattainable, but the result was an unexpected wisdom.

Although The Folding Star twins Edward with Orst in a carefully documented history that conjoins the gravitas of Nazism with the lurid reclusiveness of the painter (heavily modelled on Huysmans' Des Esseintes), the parallels persist more as a ratification of the novel than as a true deepening of it. Orst's work, Edward tells us, was "hideous, poignant or shocking … perhaps all these things at once". Paul, the curator, claims for it a poetry of mysterious contrasts, "like images in a dream".

Ricocheting from nostalgie de la boue to nostalgie du snob, from arcania to Hot Hunks demotic, from empurpled swoon to social comedy, Hollinghurst nevertheless fails to discover in the mannerisms of a previous age a satisfying manner for his own. The novel fizzles out after the love scene, when Luc dies, or disappears, or dissolves; while Edward remains in his frenzy of stasis. Even our own lousy fin de siècle deserves more vitality than this.