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A review by tptrussow
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
3.0
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library has its merits, that cannot be denied. Even as a debut novel, it’s easy to see why Hollinghurst ended up winning the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty in 2004: his prose is eloquent, elegant, rich, witty and immensely readable, with a joie de vivre that many writers would kill to have themselves. What’s more, Hollinghurst knows how to give a singular voice to his central character, a promiscuous gay aristocrat named Will Beckwith who is in his mid-twenties, has no job prospects, and basically lives a day-to-day existence cruising around London, having sex with anyone with a penis whom he finds attractive, and working out at the Corinthian Club, a sort of elite YMCA with a homoerotic atmosphere and randy voyeurs aplenty. It’s a voice filled with charisma and panache that lights up the novel and makes you smile and laugh at several points along the way, but it’s also a deeply troubled, flawed and naïve voice that gives the work an emotional weight and virtually demands a critical distance from the goings-on. For Hollinghurst is unafraid to give us a protagonist who makes terrible decisions left and right, and like a car careening out of control, we have no choice but to watch it all happen—watch the inevitable collision, the inevitable contusion as these bad decisions snowball into all kinds of uncomfortable situations and revelations. And yet, The Swimming-Pool Library is also a camp elegy of sorts that bids farewell to the last happy summer that we all inevitably have—the last time we are free in our innocence before the waves of reality come crashing onto the stone-strewn shore.
Because of the elegiac tendencies that the novel has, it’s difficult to dismiss it as a reckless and feckless depiction of a gay idyll that may or may not have existed, even though my reservations about the book precisely stem from the fact that it doesn’t give gay living sufficient depth beyond a constant fascination (and fetishizing) of the male anatomy. Almost every character moves from one body to the next, anonymously or otherwise, and when there is no sex to be had, sex is still nevertheless on the mind. At some point one wishes a wise female would come by and tell these gay men that sex is not the be-all and end-all and that one needs to find true selfhood and the capacity to love soulfully, but alas, Hollinghurst’s world is singularly male through and through and rarely delves beyond the shallowness of skin and sweat. I don’t know why—maybe he felt a woman would spoil the fun, or maybe he believed a truly gay lifestyle precluded interactions with females. Nevertheless, what we get is a testosterone-filled vision of British camp and decadence, and when everyone is either gay or holds a lecherous gaze, you just have to move on and accept it. This is, after all, a story haunted by the spectre of AIDS and sexually-transmitted death, despite the fact that it is never explicitly mentioned. Again, the last happy summer. Perhaps, too, we must be mindful of the wicked intolerance that has plagued British homosexuality throughout the centuries, of the countless laws enacted to prohibit and punish same-sex relations. It plays a prominent role in the plot, so clearly Hollinghurst does not want us to swim in the blissful ignorance that Will and his cohorts do. These men have been, more or less, liberated from legal oppression; in this book at least, they deserve to love and seek love freely. And this is not total arcadia, for episodes of gay bashing and police entrapment do crop up in order to remind us that the early 1980s were still rife with homophobia and bigotry. As much as Will is able to flirt and fool around, he is still doing it in a less-than-ideal state, and Hollinghurst knows this very well.
So even though The Swimming-Pool Library gives us a glimpse into a world where having a good time belied practical considerations—a world which, in this day and age, can no longer exist—I have to tip my hat to Hollinghurst all the same for his gutsiness at writing this tale at a time when the AIDS epidemic fostered even more misunderstanding and homophobia than usual. A book like this could have easily been fuel to a hateful fire, yet he wrote it anyway. He wanted to mark and celebrate that last happy summer, and not only that—he wanted to open the British literary canon to the queer tradition that was elided over the centuries. As I read the book, I noticed how mindful Hollinghurst was of alluding to his antecedents: to the shadowy mysteries of the Gothic, to the passions of the Romanticists, to the candour of satirists like Pope and Fielding, to the morality of the Victorian realists, and to the flamboyance of the decadent writers, including Ronald Firbank (who plays an important role in the text). The swimming-pool library, then, is not just a place for gay passions to coalesce—it’s also a place where queer writing has finally found a home amongst the masters that we have celebrated for so long. And that is where its central beauty lies, for even though it is plagued with many of the problems found in most debut novels, it is still something of an achievement in its own right.
Because of the elegiac tendencies that the novel has, it’s difficult to dismiss it as a reckless and feckless depiction of a gay idyll that may or may not have existed, even though my reservations about the book precisely stem from the fact that it doesn’t give gay living sufficient depth beyond a constant fascination (and fetishizing) of the male anatomy. Almost every character moves from one body to the next, anonymously or otherwise, and when there is no sex to be had, sex is still nevertheless on the mind. At some point one wishes a wise female would come by and tell these gay men that sex is not the be-all and end-all and that one needs to find true selfhood and the capacity to love soulfully, but alas, Hollinghurst’s world is singularly male through and through and rarely delves beyond the shallowness of skin and sweat. I don’t know why—maybe he felt a woman would spoil the fun, or maybe he believed a truly gay lifestyle precluded interactions with females. Nevertheless, what we get is a testosterone-filled vision of British camp and decadence, and when everyone is either gay or holds a lecherous gaze, you just have to move on and accept it. This is, after all, a story haunted by the spectre of AIDS and sexually-transmitted death, despite the fact that it is never explicitly mentioned. Again, the last happy summer. Perhaps, too, we must be mindful of the wicked intolerance that has plagued British homosexuality throughout the centuries, of the countless laws enacted to prohibit and punish same-sex relations. It plays a prominent role in the plot, so clearly Hollinghurst does not want us to swim in the blissful ignorance that Will and his cohorts do. These men have been, more or less, liberated from legal oppression; in this book at least, they deserve to love and seek love freely. And this is not total arcadia, for episodes of gay bashing and police entrapment do crop up in order to remind us that the early 1980s were still rife with homophobia and bigotry. As much as Will is able to flirt and fool around, he is still doing it in a less-than-ideal state, and Hollinghurst knows this very well.
So even though The Swimming-Pool Library gives us a glimpse into a world where having a good time belied practical considerations—a world which, in this day and age, can no longer exist—I have to tip my hat to Hollinghurst all the same for his gutsiness at writing this tale at a time when the AIDS epidemic fostered even more misunderstanding and homophobia than usual. A book like this could have easily been fuel to a hateful fire, yet he wrote it anyway. He wanted to mark and celebrate that last happy summer, and not only that—he wanted to open the British literary canon to the queer tradition that was elided over the centuries. As I read the book, I noticed how mindful Hollinghurst was of alluding to his antecedents: to the shadowy mysteries of the Gothic, to the passions of the Romanticists, to the candour of satirists like Pope and Fielding, to the morality of the Victorian realists, and to the flamboyance of the decadent writers, including Ronald Firbank (who plays an important role in the text). The swimming-pool library, then, is not just a place for gay passions to coalesce—it’s also a place where queer writing has finally found a home amongst the masters that we have celebrated for so long. And that is where its central beauty lies, for even though it is plagued with many of the problems found in most debut novels, it is still something of an achievement in its own right.