The Line of Beauty's action is sandwiched between the 1983 and 1987 elections. I was born in 1987; my friends and I grew up with the remnants of the 'ruthless decade' echoing around our ears. So reading this novel, with its cocaine, cottaging and piano recitals, was partly a way of reclaiming a territory we feel is ours, and want to understand, but never really knew.
The book's publication coincided with a resurgence of Eighties motifs in youth pop culture. Cinema was the first to go retro, with 'Ostalgia' piece Goodbye, Lenin!, the 1980s-set Donnie Darko and Billy Elliot, while Fame replaced Grease as the pre-teen cult musical. Bob Geldof's Live8 concert was a conscious effort to reproduce the 1985 gig for his daughters' generation, albeit with less of the spontaneity and sincerity of the original. (They don't make famine-relief pop concerts like they used to.)
The fringes of sixth-form fashion now draw on Soft Cell-era stylings, with leggings, legwarmers, big plastic beads and huge, feathered hair for girls, Pete Doherty trenchcoats, Top Gun aviators, military jackets, skinny jeans and navy peacoats for guys. Last year, www.philosophyfootball.com released an 'Enemy Within' T-shirt for the anniversary of the 1984-85 miners' strike.
The great bands of the past couple of years - Interpol, Editors, We Are Scientists, Franz Ferdinand - echo the tight, geometric sounds of the post-punk era. Las Vegas band the Killers are a self-acknowledged homage to New Order, while Bloc Party and Art Brut ostensibly borrow from the Cure and Gang of Four. Franz overtly ape pre-1989 styling, with narrow suits, tanktops and braces last seen on lounge singers east of the Berlin Wall. It's not insignificant that, in 2003, NME readers voted Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' - a song Hollinghurst's Nick Guest could have listened to at Oxford - number one single of all time.
So what's behind it all? Retro movements seem to work in 20-year cycles, with flares making a reappearance in the 1990s and psychedelia and mini-dresses briefly re-emerging before that. Recycling a period's culture is a statement of cultural maturity; by adopting styles that were popular while you were a toddler, you can assume a false age and tap into a somehow more 'authentic' look that has been left undisturbed by the market for a few decades.
Hollinghurst appreciates the importance of timing. 'It's absurdly soon, isn't it, for a Seventies party?' says Nick. 'I mean, the Seventies were ghastly. Why would anyone want to go back to them?'
I suspect that the 'ghastliness' of the Eighties, the unashamed greed of the Feddens' asset-stripping, coke-snorting friends, is part of the Eighties' new-found attractiveness. Hollinghurst conjures a brashness, a sense of dynamism and conflict that disappeared under John Major and Tony Blair.
Nick's world demands picking teams: reds versus blues, Thatcher versus Scargill, East versus West. Whose mast do we pin our colours to now? Blair? Cameron? Galloway? Coldplay? Life seemed so much more dangerous back then. Axis of evil? What a joke. Give us the evil empire.
The clockwork elegance of the post-punk revival is a reaction to the casual noise of nu-metal; the thin paisley ties and Stanley-knifed hair, what novelist and columnist Nirpal Dhaliwal recently branded 'weed chic' for 'pasty, anorexic rejects', signify a search for sartorial definition after the androgyny of hoodies and baggy jeans.
My generation misses the unabashed villainy in politics. Whereas the novel's civil servants brag that 'the economy's in ruins, no one's got a job and we just don't care; it's bliss', our generation has politicians who spend millions on pretending they agree with us. Homosexuality is no longer taboo, socialism's dead and the working classes are lampooned via Vicky Pollard rather than clubbed by mounted police. The wars that raged through the 1980s are over. And it's really rather boring.
This is fairly callous, of course. Coal wars and cold wars make great album covers but, unless you had a pad in Chelsea, they probably weren't that great to live through. For my generation, however, mass unemployment and nuclear chess games are just devices, like red braces, in a loose cultural collage. We know the iconography and the bass lines but never really understand the meaning behind them. Thatcher? She was all puppet and no trousers.
