Author Alan Hollinghurst tackles seven decades of gay sex and social change in 'The Sparsholt Affair'

Since British novelist Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Sparsholt Affair hit shelves earlier this month, it's been hailed as a sensation. 

The novel's story spans more than seven decades and three generations, from the Second World War through to the year 2012. It explores the complicated relationship between Johnny, a young artist who came of age after homosexuality was decriminalized, and his father David, who wasn't able to have the same freedom.

Hollinghurst, who is known for his portrayals of love, family life and friendship, first came to prominence with his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, in 1988. Many of his books explore the constraints placed on gay identity and how they change over time.

Here's part of his conversation with Day 6 host Brent Bambury: 

Brent Bambury: Your love of history is deeply evident in The Sparsholt Affair. When you set out to write this novel, did you know it would span 75 years?

I think I did, yes. I knew that I wanted to start it in that interesting period in the first year of the war in Oxford. But I always knew that it was going to leap forward through the decades.

Why did you want this book to span that period of time? 

I think I've become more interested, as I've got older, in the changes and ironies of time and memory. I think it's an inevitable thing. I find myself interested in [the] long term consequences of things... and interested in the large social changes which are going on in the background of the narrative. I think what I always tend to write about is the intimate lives of my characters, but of course they're deeply affected by larger things going on in the background.

Before the main character of the novel, Johnny, is even born, we meet his father David Sparsholt, a student at Oxford having an illicit fling with a male classmate. We never really learn the details of that relationship. In fact, even though Johnny's father is a character throughout this novel, he's elusive. He's off-stage through much of it. Why did you choose to keep so many details of David Sparsholt elusive and a mystery? 

I think I wanted him to be one of those people who create a stir, who have an impact on other people, and possibly onto whom other people project their own desires and needs. He's strikingly handsome and athletic when he's first observed by a rather bookish group of fellow students, some of whom become rather fixated on him. He's very young at this time. He's still only 17. I hoped in that first part of the book you'd get an idea of someone discovering his own power and the power that he might have over other people. 

As you say, none of the book is actually seen from David Sparsholt's point of view. But he's someone whose impact on the lives of the other people of the book is considerable, and that was really my interest in him as an element in the story. Johnny, his son, really becomes the main character of the book.

The beginning of the novel is a memoir that was written by one of David's contemporaries in Oxford. That is an interesting way to frame the start of this narrative. Why did you decide to do that? Who gets to tell the story of David Sparsholt? 

That was exactly the question that I wanted the reader to sort of puzzle about. Whose story is this? I think I've been increasingly interested in that, and it's something you can do if you're writing novels that cover a large time span. Sometimes, someone else turns out to be the subject of the story from the person who [you] thought it was going to be at the beginning. I suppose everyone is the hero of the story of their own lives, but they only have walk-on parts in other people's.

But also, I wanted to introduce the idea of the unknowability of the private lives of other people. I think the thing which does interest me is the fact that although the novelist can give you privileged access to the lives of characters, in life, there's so much that we don't know about the private lives, even of people quite close to us. At the same time, I hope that [I'm] creating enough narrative propulsion to keep the reader interested. 

Certainly the world in which this new book is appearing is a very different one from the one in which my first book appeared exactly 30 years ago.- Alan Hollinghurst

The British press certainly think they have a line on David Sparsholt's life and they're handed, by him, this political sex scandal that changes the course of David's narrative and Johnny's too. You've written about the British press before in The Line of Beauty, but I sense that you don't think it's the press who really get to determine history. Is that right?

I don't think that entirely, but it certainly has an extraordinary strong role in it. When I think about things which have been happening to us recently, like this catastrophic decision to leave the European Union, it's tremendously influenced by the press.

And of course, when you have a scandal such as the one that happens in the middle of this book, there's that element of prurience that the press caters to. I think that's another reason that people don't often really know what's happened in the scandal because they're just given these sort of salacious gobbets by the media.

You came out to your own dad in the 1970s when you were a student at Oxford. What was that like?

I didn't do it in a direct way. I think he intuited what was going on. He said to me when we were out in the car one day, "You've got any particular girlfriends at the moment?" And I said, "No, dad." And he said, "You're not really interested, are you?" And I said, "Well no, I'm not really." And he said, "No, I thought not." 

He did it in a sort of very quiet and quick and oblique way, which I think may be typical of the way a lot of families have dealt with this question. 

In the 30 years that you've been writing, did you think that attitudes would change as much as they have? 

I don't think I did. When I started writing my first novel, it was even before the AIDS crisis had come. I started writing that to explore new freedoms, really. Literary fiction in England hadn't really gone into this whole fascinating field of gay lives and written about it with any sort of clarity and candor. Whilst I was writing that book, the AIDS crisis really got going and the whole world I was writing about was changing. I think when you're writing about something like this, part of the interest is that it keeps on changing. And certainly the world in which this new book is appearing is a very different one from the one in which my first book appeared exactly 30 years ago.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear our full interview with Alan Hollinghurst, download our podcast or click 'Listen' above.