Margaret Thatcher (Symbol)
Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party and Prime Minister during the novel, is not only of her party, but of the general sentiment in the United Kingdom. For much of the 1980s, people in the United Kingdom looked towards and longed for the past. They wanted a return to where things once were and did not want things to progress as rapidly as they had. And Margaret Thatcher delivered just that for them: a return to what once had been. That kind of environment makes it much more difficult for Nick and other HIV/AIDS positive people to be accepted by the country and those around them. They feared reprisals from people who didn't want things to change.
Wealth (Symbol)
Wealth, and money more specifically, is a symbol of the power many people in the United Kingdom (particularly those connected to politics) desired. For many, they used money as a way to control other people and force them to bend to their wills–ideologically and otherwise.
HIV/AIDS (Symbol)
Although based in reality and very much real, many U.K. Conservatives considered HIV/AIDS to be considered a reckoning for gay people throughout the world. They saw it as a symbol of their degeneracy and thought it was given to them by god to make them suffer for disobeying Him and His guidance. This misguided thought underscores the extent to which the Conservative party wanted to take the U.K. back to the proverbial stone age in terms of acceptance of different people.
Lithium (Symbol)
The lithium Catherine takes to manage her Bipolar disorder is a very powerful symbol of the time the novel is set in. The lithium, which is used to tamp down on behavior many would consider "crazy," is reflective of what many thought the U.K. needed: medication to control the "crazy."
Nick leaving the Fedden family (motif)
Perhaps the most common motif in the novel is Nick leaving the Fedden family. At several instances throughout the novel, Nick leaves the Fedden family household, oftentimes upset with the way that they have treated him or treated fellow gay people. This is reflective of the thoughts many had when dealing with the Conservative party in the U.K.
The Fedden's home (symbol)
The book’s narrative is a stream of Nick’s conscience as Hollinghurst uses extremely descriptive language of Nicks surroundings. The endless description of physicalities around the family home and the alliteration of “french furniture” and “double drawing room” reinforces his incontestable obsessive aura over aesthetics. He further goes on to describe a “gilt frame”, serving as symbolism and as a metaphor to portray the society in which Nick lives and how this shapes his identity as an outsider. It serves as a veneer depicting an image of luxury on the surface, but beneath lies a moral decay of the corrupt society. Moreover, the description of a "Capriccio" refers to landscape or architectural compositions that combine real elements such as recognizable buildings or monuments with elements of fantasy. Nick's world is, in many ways, a construction, an elaborate composition where the tangible wealth, beauty, and decorum of his surroundings are underscored by a deeper, more troubling fantasy about belonging, identity, and status. Just as in a capriccio, where architectural grandeur may be exaggerated or distorted to evoke a certain feeling rather than representing truth in a literal sense, Nick’s understanding of his social world is similarly distorted by his fantasies of acceptance and admiration. This dissonance and imagery of wealth reveals not just the fragility of his status within this society, but also the precariousness of the boundaries between his ‘personal’ identity of his heritage and middle-class upbringing, and his interpreted identity which he crafts to fit into this world of privilege. Ultimately, the metaphor of capriccio serves as a subtle commentary on the way Nick constructs his social persona, layering reality with artifice, and suggesting that the society he inhabits is itself a carefully curated illusion, where appearances often override substance. This critique could symbolize Nick’s façade of wealth and prosperity, a calculated political maneuver designed to assimilate into a particular societal framework, crafting a deceptive persona that conceals the inner discord between outward performance and true self.
