The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst

Published 1994 · 422 pages · 162,531 words · about 21 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Folding Star to read?

The Folding Star scores 76 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
The text employs a sophisticated and expansive vocabulary, frequently drawing from literary, artistic, and historical domains (e.g., 'minatory,' 'cacophonous,' 'hypotaxis,' 'monstrances,' 'pudeur,' 'phaeretic'). It also incorporates French phrases and numerous cultural allusions, requiring a well-read adult, though it avoids invented language or overly specialized jargon.
Sentence structure: 78 out of 100
Sentences are consistently long and intricately structured, often featuring multiple nested clauses, parenthetical asides, and sophisticated punctuation. This hypotactic style, reminiscent of Proust, demands sustained attention to follow the narrator's complex, flowing thoughts and detailed observations.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
While grounded in concrete events and observations, the narrative is deeply introspective, constantly analyzing the narrator's emotions, motives, and interpretations of the world. It uses rich metaphors and literary allusions to explore themes of desire, identity, and art, elevating the text beyond simple narrative into a realm of psychological and philosophical probing.
Information density: 78 out of 100
The prose is exceptionally rich, packing detailed observations, complex psychological states, and cultural allusions into extended sentences and paragraphs. The narrative layers external events with deep internal processing, requiring continuous, active engagement to grasp its numerous interconnected ideas and subtle nuances.
Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
Edward's intense self-consciousness and projections filter almost every external event and interaction, requiring readers to constantly infer the objective reality behind his subjective lens. His internal monologues often reveal more about his own desires and anxieties than the external world, making character motivations and relationship dynamics largely implicit. This pervasive filtering demands significant reader participation to construct meaning beyond the narrator's immediate perceptions.
Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
The narrative is saturated with symbolic elements, from the decaying city architecture and the Symbolist paintings of Edgard Orst to recurring motifs of mirrors, gardens, and clothing. These symbols actively shape Edward's perceptions and desires, often reflecting his internal world and the novel's broader themes of art, history, sexuality, and self-delusion. The blending of saintly and pagan myths in 'St Narcissus' further exemplifies this layered meaning.
Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
A pronounced ironic distance exists between Edward's often romanticized or self-pitying internal narrative and the more mundane, awkward, or even pathetic reality implied by the author. Edward's self-delusion, particularly in his infatuation with Luc and his assessments of other characters, is subtly but consistently highlighted. This pervasive irony shapes the reader's understanding of his character and motivations, inviting a critical reading of his experiences.
Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
The narrative consistently resists definitive closure, leaving many questions about Edward's relationships, his emotional stability, and his future open-ended. Key plot points, such as the full details of Luc's expulsion or the true nature of Edward's connections with Cherif and Matt, are presented with deliberate ambiguity. Edward's internal conflicts and desires remain largely unresolved, reflecting a journey rather than a destination.
Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
While primarily a first-person narrative, the text employs significant structural complexity through its fluid movement between present events, detailed childhood flashbacks, and vivid, often sexually charged, dream sequences and fantasies. These internal digressions and the narrator's unreliable perspective frequently disrupt linear progression, requiring the reader to actively navigate a layered and subjective reality. The blurring of memory, desire, and immediate experience creates a rich but demanding reading experience.

How The Folding Star is regarded

The Folding Star holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Folding Star sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (294 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Folding Star scores 80 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I hung back and looked in the mirror at Edward Manners, the pudging, bespectacled English teacher twice his age.
Symbol: Formal
this plausible legend seemed to have been wilfully confounded with the pagan myth of the boy-flower.
Mythos: Irony phase 4 (Tragic pathos) (irony iv)
I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him away.
Genre: Confession + Novel
The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle.

Where the story of The Folding Star takes place

  • Unnamed Flemish city and the coast, September-December 1991, the main setting
  • Brussels and Ostend, 1898-99: Orst and Jane Byron (1898 to 1899)
  • Occupied Belgium, 1940-45: Paul, Willem and Orst's death (1940 to 1945)
  • Rough Common, Surrey: adolescence, Dawn and the father's death, 1976-77 (1976 to 1977)
  • Rough Common, November 1991: Dawn's funeral

5 things that are true of The Folding Star, with the passage for each

  1. The first man Edward meets in the Cassette has the letters R, O, S, E tattooed on his fingers.

    I glimpsed tattooed letters on his four fingers: R, O, S, E.

  2. Edward Manners is thirty-three.

    How any groping, now, at thirty-three, retained the freshness and the shock of those first twilight wanderings out of bounds

  3. Orst's lover Jane Byron drowned at Ostend in May 1899.

    her death by drowning at Ostend in May 1899

  4. Edward steals the negatives of the photographs from Luc's desk drawer.

    I slipped out the strands of negative in their crinkled wrapper and tucked them deep into my inner breast pocket.

  5. Matt's real name is Wim Vermeulen, and he changed it after prison.

    He’s really called Wim Vermeulen.

Scenes in The Folding Star that Frye would name

45 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
It was a turning-point in my life, this second sighting of Luc. Edward recognises his love and its hopelessness in a single pivot of seeing.
Eiron, untitled
I hung back and looked in the mirror at Edward Manners, the pudging, bespectacled English teacher twice his age. Edward's self-deprecating, self-seeing posture sums up the eiron.
Displacement, untitled
this plausible legend seemed to have been wilfully confounded with the pagan myth of the boy-flower. The myth of Narcissus shows through the realistic Jesuit school and its uniform.
Pathos, untitled
seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tyres of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death The imagined scene of Colin and Dawn's fatal car crash.
Sparagmos, untitled
he was all over the crushed cabin as if he had been detonated Colin's dismembered body in the burning wreck.
Anagnorisis, untitled
And then I saw, with a bleak little sinking of the heart, what the scrap of paper in his pocket had been. The scrap of paper is revealed to be Dr Boesmans' address, not Edward's, recasting the earlier scene.

Books that share these scenes with The Folding Star

About the author

Alan Hollinghurst