The Swimming-Pool Library
By Alan Hollinghurst
Vintage 2006
Reading Booker-winner Alan Hollinghurst’s debut novel, set in London’s gay scene in the summer of 1983 and embedded in the city’s streets, bars, clubs and parks, is rather like being allowed access to a secret world that has, in fact, always been right before your eyes.
The story is narrated by the engaging voice of privileged young aristocrat, William Beckwith. During this long, hot summer Will is busy revelling in the city’s framing of his desires: ‘I was enthralled, almost breathless, at the very idea of men, the mythological beauty of them running under trees and sunlight in the Avenue or in the long perspectives of Kensington Gardens’. Yet his tales of promiscuity and vanity are always tempered with astute observation, self-knowledge and wit – qualities that make Will a flawed, but very likeable character, and the perfect foil for Hollinghurst’s exploration of gay history and experience. Despite the frequent and graphic fornication and idealisation of male beauty, the writing is never self-indulgent, but rather, lyrical, precise, funny and, at times, matter of fact in its clarity.
Good-looking, over-educated and erudite, Will has given up the day job he never needed at an architectural publishers and instead idles his days away at the Corry – The Corinthian Club – a gentlemen’s club, gym and meeting place where he coyly admits, ‘More than once I had ended up in a bedroom of the hotel above with a man I had smiled at in the shower.’ But despite Will’s enjoyment of his own promiscuity, the novel’s most potent love affair is with the past. Will’s voice
recollects the narrative from an undisclosed present: ‘The last summer of its kind there was ever to be […] it was my time, my belle époque’. And by the end of the novel he gloomily notes that now, ‘So much had ended, so many things had
gone crooked and bad.’ (Including, one infers, the Aids epidemic, which at the time of the novel is yet to happen.)
In between his various furtive encounters and more serious love affairs with two younger, working class men, he, by chance, saves the life of the ancient Lord Charles Nantwich. Born at the century’s beginning, Charles’s life story slowly unravels, revealing its mysterious connections to Will’s own. Moving between that glorious summer and the distant past via Charles’s diaries, which occupy Will throughout the novel, their unlikely relationship provides the rich intricacies of the story and a dialogue between past and present. Clearly following in the tradition of gay literature – Ronald Firbank even makes a cameo appearance – themes of loss and desire drive the narrative.
Fittingly then, both men idealise the memory of the sexually charged, wholly male environments of their boarding school days (women are emphatically not present in the novel and are only alluded to in a derogatory manner) which represent a promiscuous world free of wider societal restraints. To both, there is something pure and innocent in that time, now permanently lost. Will recalls: ‘I still dream, once a month or so, of that changing-room, its slatted floor and benches. In our retrogressive slang it was known as the Swimming-Pool Library. […] Sometimes I think that shadowy, doorless little shelter – which is all it was really, an empty, empty place – is where at heart I want to be.’
