The Swimming-Pool Library

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the title is laughable. the narrator's constant presence at the local english equivalent of the ymca swimming pool is metaphorically (?) tied to his dreamy past hooking up with guys in the school swimming pool, both of which are thematically (?) linked up with Lord Nantwich's rather more hedonistic private pool. that is some serious over-reaching there, hollinghurst. One question he refuses to engage with is whether he is still pigeonholed as a gay writer. This was the canard that followed him on his promotional tour for The Line Of Beauty, when interviewers asked whether his gayness defined him as a writer and every news piece was headlined, "Gay writer wins Booker". "I have a feeling it's changed," he says. "I spent 20 years politely answering the question, 'How do you feel when people categorise you as a gay writer?' and I'm not going to do it this time round. It's no longer relevant." Coming of Age Tales in which the protagonist struggles to come out, often against his unsympathetic surroundings. often tender; occasionally mawkish.

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.

Success!

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. The Stranger's Child – the title comes from Tennyson's In Memoriam – is Hollinghurst's fifth novel, and his first since The Line Of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004. His first four books, written over a span of almost 20 years, form a quartet that explore gay life in the UK, present and past. The Swimming-Pool Library, his sex-drenched first book, published in 1988, mapped the gay world before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality; The Folding Star (1994) was a disturbing study of pederastic desire; The Spell (1998) a sex-and-drugs-fuelled comedy of manners; The Line Of Beauty another dark comedy exposing the hypocrisy and cupidity of the 1980s. What's he having?' I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass.

In The Spell, Alex – who has "contracted the occasional ailment of the late developer, an aversion to his own past" – recalls his horror of the country town in which he'd grown up, with its "old outfitters selling brown and mauve clothes [and] photos of fetes and beauty contests and British Legion dinners in the window of the newspaper office, which might almost have been the window of a museum". He also tenderly recalls the solitary child's "taste for lonely places", playing hide and seek alone. "It can't be hide and seek if no one's coming to look for you, darling," his mother tells him. "It's just hide." 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. I wish I could quote more but already there is a lot going on. Hollinghurst takes a cliché of romantic fiction and gives it several ironic twists. The cliché in this case is that of the serial philanderer who meets our heroine and is reformed by love. Here the philanderer is a gay man. This is a beautiful twist. But he is also the narrator, which is another twist. We are asked to identify with the philanderer. To make it even more piquant, the philanderer is an aristocratic English gentleman who has been brought up in the finest English traditions – the traditions of queazy tums and other feeble excuses. Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere.

Phil, the second of William's boyfriends in the book, met at the Corry. He lives in the dingy staff quarters of a famous hotel and likes to read.

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. I agree. He has a very fine English style. He also has a delicate sensibility. He has a beautiful sense of irony. He is mischievous, cheeky and arch, while at the same time having a coy vulnerability. Trapped in close confinement with Arthur, Will begins to resent him. Their boredom and tension occasionally erupts in bouts of sex. Will goes to a cinema that shows gay pornography and has anonymous sex. On the train home, Will reads Valmouth, a novel by Ronald Firbank, given to him by his best friend, James. James is a hard-working doctor who is insecure and sexually frustrated as a gay man. The novel by Firbank echoes themes central to The Swimming-Pool Library; secrets and discretion; extreme old age, colonialism, race and camp; the sense of deeper truths residing behind a thin façade of artifice. I wonder if, with the new novel done, he feels bereaved. "Normally, I do have a brief but acute sort of depression when I finish a book, which is to do with saying goodbye to this place you've been inhabiting. But I was so desperate to get this thing off that I seem to have escaped that." He has a deep, drawly voice – so deep he used to be known as Basso Profundo when he worked at the Times Literary Supplement in the 80s – and a hesitant, donnish manner, but his brown eyes sparkle behind his glasses, and he laughs a great deal, managing to take himself very seriously and at the same time not in the least seriously.The Swimming-Pool Library won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1988, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989. The story is interestingly told through the eyes of a thirtyish gay man in the prime of his life simply lounging, working out, and having sexual encounters of the various kind. The plot dupes you into regarding the plot as non-existent and that the book will tell the typical tale of a lounger, but the author starts dropping hints to an underlying secret. Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details – You never stop learning a language, which is why I buy two unabridged English novels from Audible every month and listen to them with as much concentration as I can muster. Style is very important. I don't like to listen to bad style. So I choose very carefully what I listen to. Those books become like voices in my head. I absorb every cadence. I internalise, verbalise and repeat.

Not knowing a hell of a lot about gay life or the gay community (in Britain or anywhere else) or British fiction, I feel this is something I can't really comment on. Can he imagine writing a book with no gay characters or gay themes? Pause. "I still slightly feel there are a lot of those around already, and I'm not sure my heart would be completely in it." He has embarked on his next novel, and says it will "certainly have a gay strand in it, though the protagonists will all be more or less heterosexual." The "more or less" is significant: sexuality in Hollinghurst's world is fluid. "There's a lot in The Stranger's Child which is rather liminal," he says. "There's quite a lot of bisexuality. One of the ideas of the book is about the unknowability or uncategorisability of human behaviour, and I was rather tempted into those ambiguous sexual areas." 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.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.