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A review by j_r_eads
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
3.0
3.5 ⭐️
Full disclosure, of Hollinghurst’s work, I’ve only read The Line of Beauty, which remains a favourite of mine, and now this. But that being said, I think I’ve got you sussed, Hollinghurst old chap. This seems to be your modus operandi, rather: over-privileged, over-sexed, over-idealised bright young things, who, with their high society lifestyles and petite bourgeois problems, are completely self involved and thoroughly dislikable.
The reverse of the book carries a commendation from the Guardian which hails this as ”the first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... a historic novel”: a sentiment which might as much prove to be the book’s epitaph. For between the loose relationship some of these characters have with consent, the belief that boys at about 14 are fair game and the fact that our Marys seem to do nothing but sit around in a late afternoon, mid-week malaise, fantaising about all the ways they could be buggering (their highly fetishised ‘ideal’ of) a working class black boy from the exotic backwaters of Tower Hamlets, it reads as shockingly outdated and more than a little icky.
In fact, The Swimming-Pool Library now reads to 2020-Generation-who-gives-a-fuck much the same way that the Nantwich diaries probably read to Will - a highly eroticised, idealised, glamourised and not entirely reliable recount of a bygone era. Approach it rather as a snapshot in time - not a reflection of modern gay life. (And speaking of a snapshot in time, the novel is ostensibly set in 80s London but reads as rather untethered in history for it makes absolutely no reference to the impact of Thatcherism on the LGBT community or to the AIDS crisis!)
At one point, Will asks, “Why be encumbered by the furtive peccadilloes of the past”...?
Right on the money, old chap! Why indeed?
Full disclosure, of Hollinghurst’s work, I’ve only read The Line of Beauty, which remains a favourite of mine, and now this. But that being said, I think I’ve got you sussed, Hollinghurst old chap. This seems to be your modus operandi, rather: over-privileged, over-sexed, over-idealised bright young things, who, with their high society lifestyles and petite bourgeois problems, are completely self involved and thoroughly dislikable.
The reverse of the book carries a commendation from the Guardian which hails this as ”the first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... a historic novel”: a sentiment which might as much prove to be the book’s epitaph. For between the loose relationship some of these characters have with consent, the belief that boys at about 14 are fair game and the fact that our Marys seem to do nothing but sit around in a late afternoon, mid-week malaise, fantaising about all the ways they could be buggering (their highly fetishised ‘ideal’ of) a working class black boy from the exotic backwaters of Tower Hamlets, it reads as shockingly outdated and more than a little icky.
In fact, The Swimming-Pool Library now reads to 2020-Generation-who-gives-a-fuck much the same way that the Nantwich diaries probably read to Will - a highly eroticised, idealised, glamourised and not entirely reliable recount of a bygone era. Approach it rather as a snapshot in time - not a reflection of modern gay life. (And speaking of a snapshot in time, the novel is ostensibly set in 80s London but reads as rather untethered in history for it makes absolutely no reference to the impact of Thatcherism on the LGBT community or to the AIDS crisis!)
At one point, Will asks, “Why be encumbered by the furtive peccadilloes of the past”...?
Right on the money, old chap! Why indeed?