The Swimming-Pool Library

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On the train, Will cruises a young man whom he takes home; they engage in sexual intercourse. He begins to read Charles's papers.

He is also deeply interested in the form of the novel – a form in which he says he has an “undiminished confidence”, feeling that people will continue to want to read it for a long time to come. Our conversation about reflecting historical change in fiction leads him to an astute observation, about “a larger question, which one’s always seeing articles about, wondering why there are so few mobile phones in novels”. His view is that there is something “inherently old-fashioned in the novel. There is a subconsciously retrospective element of entering the world of a novel, even if it’s about something burningly contemporary. There’s something old-fashioned about the experience of being narrated to.” refering to this book that Will's "librarian" friend at the club where he swims "Nigel...had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book's bald graffiti" This facility is part of a unique collection of community and elite facilities governed by MCRactive, a not for profit organisation established and overseen by Manchester City Council. It is operated by Better under the MCRactive brand. In 1988, Edmund White called it, "surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author." [1] Awards [ edit ] 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.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. However this book has a moral agenda - sort of, a history lesson and hidden depths. William is approached by Lord Nantwich, a man whose life he had previously saved while loitering in a public lavatory, to write his biography and through the research and reading Nantwich's diaries he uncovers elements of a sad and unpleasant past, previously hidden to him. to me, the self-relegation of most gay novels between these two categories can be annoying, but i suppose understandable. gays have to come out of the closet and so this intense experience is perfectly paired with the classic coming-of-age tale's structure. and gays are also often rejected by straight society, so why not rejoice in the telling of tales that in turn reject that straight world, that rolls its eyes at it, that have narratives that seem to posit that straights are the actual minority? Swimming-Pool falls squarely within that second category. In contrast to the excellent Line of Beauty, which takes place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Swimming Pool Library is set in the early 1980s at which time it was apparently still possible to have daily unprotected sex with strangers with no adverse physical health effects other than the occasional beating by right-wing skinheads. Not as fun as it sounds if this book is anything to go by.

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.

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Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details –

Hollinghurst's own life has to be pieced together from shards of fact; not unlike the way lives gradually, reluctantly reveal themselves in his books. He says he has been "incontrovertibly" gay since he was an undergraduate in the early 70s, but prefers not to say when he first realised he was gay. He was an only child, the son of a bank manager in Stroud, Gloucestershire, which one imagines in the 50s as a sleepy, conservative country town. Just such a town is the setting for one section of The Stranger's Child; there is even a bank and a bank manager, who is married to Daphne's daughter and has been psychologically damaged by the second world war. I ask whether there is anything of his own father in that portrait. "They are very unlike my own parents, I'm rather relieved to say, but I spent the first eight years of my life living in a house above a bank and playing in the bank after everyone had gone home, so it was a plunge into memory doing all that, and I rather enjoyed recreating it."

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I feel like I have nothing to say about this book. Nonetheless I'm going to write a review, because this is what I do. You have been warned. 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." The tautness and energy of Alan Hollinghurst's novel derive from its ambiguous status a it shimmers somewhere between pastoral romance and sulphurous confession, between an affectionate and credible rendering of contemporary mores and lurid melodrama...classic English prose...surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author' - The Sunday Times You can do different things at each leisure centre, but a LiveWire membership means you can go to any centre and use the gym or swimming pool, book tennis courts and other sport pitches, and go to fitness classes. Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Anchor P/Doubleday, 1978.