Plot summary

The novel is the story of an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 man, Edward Manners, who, disaffected with life, moves to a town in Flanders

Flanders

Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...

 where he teaches two students English. One, Marcel, is good but ugly while the other, Luc, is bad but, to the protagonist, deeply beautiful. The novel also deals with Manners' emerging relationship with Marcel's father who curates a museum of symbolist paintings by Edgard Orst (modelled on Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff as a Belgian symbolist painter.- Youth and Training :...

 and James Ensor

James Ensor

James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...

). Edward has an affair with a young foreigner named Cherif who falls deeply in love with him, but as Cherif is ordinary looking, Edward can never really return his affection. We see the same pattern in the novel's recounting of Edward's youthful affair years earlier (when he was even younger than Luc) with Dawn, a handsome but not particularly beautiful youth who later dies tragically. Edward soon became bored with him, and even now he can only gin up much feeling about Dawn by giving his past affair and the subsequent death of his old love a high literary treatment modeled after the tradition of the pastoral elegy. Like his forerunner von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice"(who obsesses over the beautiful Tadzio), and the artist Orst, Edward is a lover of beauty, not a lover of people, and people's beauty is fleeting. Thus the disappearance of Jane Byron, Orst's beautiful model, and later of Luc, Edward's version of Tadzio, represents how cruel life can be to those who worship at Beauty's altar.

Many of the characters (Manners, Orst, Marcel's father, Luc) are marked by obsession with others. The past continually intrudes into the twilight world Hollinghurst evokes, dragging Manners back to England for a time. Two major characters, both objects of romantic obsession, mysteriously disappear. The long-lost Jane Byron, beloved model for Orst, had swum out to sea at Ostend

Ostend

Ostend  is a Belgian city and municipality located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerke , Stene and Zandvoorde, and the city of Ostend proper – the largest on the Belgian coast....

, Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

, decades ago and was never seen again, leaving the artist with a life-long obsession for painting her image. The beautiful youth Luc, obsessive love interest of the protagonist Manners, also disappears. In the book's enigmatic conclusion, Luc is last seen looking out from one of many photographs of missing children on a salt-spattered bulletin board at the beach in Ostend. Thus, like Byron, he ultimately ends up existing only within a frame, and his disappearance is poetically linked to the "shiftless" North Sea

North Sea

In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...

 waves at the famous beach.

Reception

The Folding Star won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...

 for fiction in 1994.

It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and...

.

The New York Review of Books described it thus: "You could read this novel as a miniature Remembrance of Things Past. Or as an expanded Death in Venice... or as a homosexual Lolita.... It is an immense pleasure to read, [filled with] funniness and poetry, handled with amazing sensitivity and accuracy."
Peter Kemp

Peter Kemp

Peter Kemp was a British swimmer who competed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. He participated in water polo and swimming at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris and won a bronze medal in the 200 m obstacle event and a gold medal in water polo....

, Times Literary Supplement critic, said, "Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings."