The Swimming-Pool Library

Product Information

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. The carpets are beige – I feel an urge to remove my shoes; the walls white; each picture, each object, has its place; a cleaner is doing her weekly rounds – young, dark-haired, Spanish perhaps, the most beautiful cleaner you have ever seen. There is absolute silence, broken only by a loud burst of the overture to Swan Lake on Hollinghurst's mobile phone when his mother calls. As well as Tchaikovsky's lush ballet scores, he has an enduring love of Henry James – there is a bookcase of Jamesiana in his top-floor study. James became his art; forswore life to write perfect fictions. My immediate suspicion is that the pupil is taking the same course as the master, though I accept it is a large thesis to hang on beige furnishings.

Stroud might have been terminally inhibiting for the young Hollinghurst, but he escaped. At eight his "aspirational" parents took the curious decision to send him to prep school as a boarder. "Neither of my parents had been to boarding school, but they thought it was important," he says vaguely. From there, he went to Canford public school in Dorset, also as a boarder, and it proved an artistic awakening. "Being in a beautiful and interesting old house made a profound impression on me at an early stage." The decision to send him away was to be the making of the young aesthete, as well as the beginning of the remarkable voice. An emergency meeting was held at the Town Hall in Aberdeen for councillors to have a second vote on budget cuts. Following deliberations, the decision was confirmed by a vote of 24-21. 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. Hollinghurst does indeed look tweedy and staid in the school photograph that accompanies his article in the Canfordian. He has described living his life in reverse: hemmed in in his teens and 20s, when he was at Oxford, living in a house with Andrew Motion and doing a thesis on three gay writers, EM Forster, Firbank and LP Hartley, working at a time when it was not possible to write openly about homosexuality; then flowering in his 30s after he came to London. Bradley, John. “Disciples of St Narcissus: In Praise of Alan Hollinghurst.” The Critical Review 36 (1996): 3-18.Andrew Motion considers that Hollinghurst has 'a great capacity for joy and happiness', but doesn't believe that his intensely romantic nature naturally or inevitably leads to desire for completion by another person. 'I asked him once whether he was lonely and he said he has never been lonely. His sense of self is very centred.' Saved by Art, the Shy, Steely Ronald Firbank,” edited version of the third of the 2006 Lord Northcliffe Lectures given at University College under the title “Delightful Difficulties.” The Times Literary Supplement. November 17, 2006: 12-15. I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be communicated, but in silence."

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 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. The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic debut' - The Guardian Verhaeren. “Le Moulin.” The Penguin Book of French Verse. Eds. Brian Woledge, Geoffrey Brereton and Anthony Hartley. London: Penguin, 1975. 472-73.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."

The group interchanged chants of “shame on ACC”, “save our libraries” and “save our swimming pool” as councillors got their Wednesday morning meeting underway. 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. Between the new leisure centre and new library are five commercial units. Currently empty, these units are set to be filled with new businesses later in the year. WalesOnline understands the new Cadno Lounge restaurant is set to fill one - you can read more about the new restaurant here - while another unit will be filled by a bilingual childcare company. Further information about businesses in the other units is expected to come later in the year. Secondly, I couldn't quite relate to Will. We're very different in character and personality, and that also lessens my enjoyment of a book. He rarely did things I downright disagreed with, but I didn't feel strongly connected to him either. I guess there were things I didn't understand and didn't share with him.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. Campaigners say they’re facing a devastating loss after Aberdeen councillors cemented plans to close a community swimming pool and six libraries. I definitely don't think that Hollinghurst was very critical of Will in the text--at least not in an overly visible or emphatic way. However, he certainly expected the reader to be. His sympathetic yet unembellished portrayal of Will is very much done to give the reader the independence to decide on Will's actions and thoughts. Is he nothing but a narcissist? The reader is forced to look critically on Will as an Oxford graduate and as the grandson of a Peer of the British Empire. His boyfriends are all lower class, and he seems to sometimes ruthlessly exploit them. Hollinghurst, as I said earlier, doesn't visibly admonish Will, but he doesn't excuse his actions either. By this time, Hollinghurst was working at the Times Literary Supplement. There is a sense in his books of life opening up for young people in London, and his friends suggest that this was very much his experience, and that it accelerated following the publication of his first novel.

there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness.

Hollinghurst followed with The Folding Star in 1994, which was also short listed for the Booker, and The Spell in 1998. He writes, he has said, 'at walking pace', a rate of 300 to 400 words a day, or perhaps none. His close friend Andrew Motion remarks: 'I sometimes ask him, "What have you been doing today?" and he says, "thinking".' I think that’s very probably true,” he answers. “I was once asked to contribute to a book of essays by writers about being only children, and actually I thought, I don’t want to examine too closely this thing which I just knew was actually rather fundamental to my psychology, to my whole being as a writer. That double sense of being an outsider, wanting to penetrate a world, but also having a sort of self-reliance that I think only children have. They’re very happy to be by themselves and quite a lot of their interesting life is happening when they’re by themselves.” 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. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. ( November 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)