The Swimming-Pool Library

Product Information

Sensationally sexy. This queer classic is really a historical snapshot of 20th century homosexuality in England. Hollinghurst masterly uses an amusing cast of characters to explore issues of class, wealth, race, identity and sexuality and its bit of a mystery and quite a lot of fun discovering how connected their lives are. And what about now? “The distinctive purpose of gay writing, its political purpose or its novelty or its urgency have gone, and the gay world, as it changes, is perhaps not so stimulating to a fiction writer like me,” he says – although he’s careful to make clear he’s talking about his own writing rather than issuing blanket statements. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be written about.” Hard though Hollinghurst tries to hide in public, he drops in clues about himself throughout his novels. He even appears in person at the end of The Spell, "a sympathetic-looking man with short grey hair and a darker goatee", spotted by Alex when he goes cruising on Hampstead Heath. Another character in The Spell, an unappealing antique dealer called George, is said to have "a delight in artifice and a mania for honesty". The same might be said for Hollinghurst. Finally I have found time for Alan Hollinghurst. He's been on my list for a long time because everybody in the literary establishment says what a fine style he has.

Not that it’s a grim book. White writes too exuberantly for the effect of his work ever to be really lowering, and even though The beautiful room is empty is him in a comparatively austere vein, he is still wonderfully attentive to every sentence. Here, for instance, is the narrator mastering the technique of looking at Abstract Expressionist paintings. Hollinghurst's large flat, spread over three floors, overlooks the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. He lives alone – he generally has, though there have been "periods of experiment" with live-in partners – and the flat feels monastic. "I'm not at all easy to live with," he says. "I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods. It's all become more of a challenge. I find writing novels gets harder and harder, which is not what I thought would happen. I thought you'd learn how to do it."retrogressive logic that informs Hollinghurst’s fiction-writing extends from the characters’ individual destinies to include the “irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past” ( SPL 122). For example, the Romantic idealisation of childhood finds its expression in the ethos of the public school. William’s perusal of Charles Nantwich’s papers only convinces him that they are no more, no less, than the record of his own destiny. Charles’s schooldays at Winchester are the fore-echoes of William’s own schooling, much later, in the very same prestigious establishment. Hence, a sort of solipsistic closure, in so far as the biographer’s life retraces the steps of his biographee’s, to such an extent that the former can only yearn for all the adventures which historical changes deprived him of. William, while owning up to the rights granted to the homosexuals of his generation, evinces a sort of nostalgia for the frisson of homoerotic life prior to Gay Lib. Charles Nantwich’s diary of his stay in prison, as a result of the purges in the 1950s, probably evokes Wilde’s De Profundis (Wilde 980-1059) to a younger generation, who missed the opportunity to be celebrated as martyrs. And, in the last resort, William shows no critical distance whatsoever when Charles spins out his colonial romance, pointing out how gays qualified as perfect candidates to be sent to the outposts of progress, because the authorities “had the wit to see that [they] were prone to immediate idealism and dedication” ( SPL 241). What a steaming pile of turd. I thought the Line Of Beauty was rubbish, but at least there was darkness hiding amongst the explicit sex. The Swimming Pool Library has nothing of the sort. Described by some as an elegy to the pre AIDS homosexual world, this was a tale without a single likeable character, with no human bases I could touch down with whatsoever. Perhaps it's because there isn't a single woman in this book. Perhaps it's because the main character is one of those awful dying breeds of monied posh sorts who can do nothing with their lives and still live them quite handsomely. Perhaps it's the attitude of "well, if they ban us here, let's just take our exciting news ideas to the sub continent and have our way with people who have no recourse to do anything about it." From the diaries, Will learns that Nantwich has been to Egypt and then returned to London, where he met with Ronald Firbank: an extraordinary portrait of effete decrepitude, camp and alcoholic. Multi-purpose activity rooms available to book for a range of community activities including parties, meetings, social events and clubs.

Auden, Wystan Hugh. The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber, 1953. They banged drums, trying to make as much noise as possible, as people shared memories about what the facilities meant to them and their families. By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. (Hollinghurst 2006, 15)Interestingly, Hollinghurst introduces a subtle distinction between the “gay novel,” in which the homosexual condition features prominently, and a process of “homosexualization” that would be predicated upon a particular viewpoint, at odds with that of the majority of readers and, by extension, of society at large. It is this marginalised position which led E. M. Forster, ultimately, to relinquish the novel, as a form that could not legally treat of a subject that was of paramount importance to its author. The same prohibition drove Ronald Firbank, whom Hollinghurst elects as his literary forerunner, into a career of international nomadism. This impossibility of reconciling aestheticism and homoeroticism, within the realm of the novel, due to the strictures of a bigoted, strait-laced society, more than to the limitations of a genre which is, by definition, free and open on all sides, led to a form of ostracization in the literary creation. The homosexual topic could only be touched upon, through carefully calculated strategies of obliquity. In many regards, the merciful indirection and sexual mystery, associated with the figure of Henry James, were preferred to any explicit statements. Precisely, Hollinghurst’s literary enterprise can be best described as a wilful, deliberate decision to impose a homocentric perspective on the novel genre: “To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position. [Something that] hadn’t really been done.” (“I don’t make moral judgments.”) Strangely though, it could be contended that this bid for novelty is, paradoxically, what qualifies Hollinghurst as a writer of the Tradition, even if it is a tradition on the margin of the mainstream. The fitness studios will host a wide range of group exercise classes including pilates, Zumba, indoor cycling and yoga, as well as several "virtual classes" delivered by video, including Body Pump, Body Combat and Sh'Bam. Ultimately, management hope to see 250,000 visitors come through the doors every year. You can get more Neath news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here. Will goes to an exhibition of photographs by Staines. The theme is soft-core homo-erotica. He is surprised to find Gavin there. Talking with Staines, he discovers that he and Charles have produced three pornographic films of the type that play in the cinema where Will first had sex with Phil.

Select a format:

Maybe he hasn't, maybe that was the point, but it still fell very flat to me. There were a few scenes similar to that of Call Me by Your Name, but while it was believable and heartwrenching and stunning in that book, it was devoid of any real attachment in this one. Both by me, as a reader, but also by the characters in the book. Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details – I found Hollinghurst's novel to be very enthralling and wonderfully erotic. It's such a fantastic exploration of what it was like to be a part of the gay community in the early 1980s, before AIDS altered the community and its image forever. Tony, a friend of Harold's whom Arthur believed he had killed in a scuffle, but who is later in the novel revealed to be still alive.

The theme is emphasised and its general applicability is tested by passages in the novel which deal with the work of the generation of artists who did their work in the closeted pre-Wolfenden climate. If the idea of ‘homosexual writing’ is useful, it probably applies best to the period when homosexuality was criminal, and hence when the fictional treatment of same-sex love had to be implicit, indirect, deflected, latent. Hollinghurst’s unpublished M. Litt thesis, which I stumbled across as a graduate student, made a forceful case for this idea as applied to the work of Firbank, Hartley and Forster. His novel takes up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. Through Nantwich's diary, the novel is also concerned with the lives of gay men before the gay liberation movement, both in London and in the colonies of the British Empire. Many novelists do journalism to top up their earnings. Hollinghurst does the odd book review and literary essay, but he doesn't do punditry. Isn't he tempted? "No," he says, "I don't really have opinions. After The Line Of Beauty, I was always getting requests from newspapers, asking me what the election meant for Labour, that sort of thing. I said I didn't have the faintest idea what the election meant for Labour. I just happened to have written a book that had a Tory politician in it." Will goes to Phil's hotel. He encounters a rich Argentine who propositions him. Will accepts until he finds that the man is obsessed with gay pornographic conventions, costumes and sex toys. Will finds this all slightly ridiculous and is not aroused. He refuses to consent to sex and leaves.

Planning applications

Though he always had a novel "on the go", Hollinghurst initially saw himself as a poet. He published a well-received volume of poetry with the provocative title Confidential Chats With Boys in 1982, but says the muse deserted him in 1985 on the day he signed a contract for a book of poems with Faber. In any case, by then the novel that was to establish him was well under way. In 1988, Edmund White called it, "surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author." [1] Awards [ edit ] Explaining how Neath Leisure Centre came to be, CEO of Celtic Leisure, Richard Lewis, said: "It's been two years in the making, we're running Neath Leisure Centre in conjunction with the LA [local authority, Neath Port Talbot Council] and we realised that we needed a new pool! The old Neath leisure centre, which isn't far from here, was 55 years old and was in need of a significant amount of work done to it, so we decided to build a new leisure centre with all the facilities and make it really visible and accessible. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL18479904M Openlibrary_edition