The Swimming-Pool Library

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Large sports hall with six badminton courts and the ability to host two five-a-side football pitches. Hollinghurst's hero, Henry James, had three distinct writing periods – early, middle and late. He even seems to have imagined them in capital letters. Does Hollinghurst think in those terms? "No," he says firmly. "That would be insanely self-conscious and self-important. I've always felt I was going gropingly into the future." Yet The Stranger's Child, with its wider canvas, excavation of the past and rumination on whether we can ever really establish the truth, does mark a new chapter. It may not be Middle Hollinghurst, in the sense in which James would have understood it, but it is the work of a middle-aged writer, whereas the four earlier novels were the work of a younger man galvanised by his arrival in London and by exposure to a suddenly more assertive gay world after 10 years doing EngLit at Oxford in the 70s. If, as Schopenhauer said, the first 40 years of life supply the text and the next 30 the commentary on it, Hollinghurst, at 57, is now well into the latter.

Eliot has the “tremor of wit” Hollinghurst has to experience to really get into a writer; “immensely serious” though she is, “she’s tremendously witty and passionate and often terribly funny as well, although she can bang on a bit”. But then, as he says of himself, he likes to go on a bit too. Bradley, John. “Disciples of St Narcissus: In Praise of Alan Hollinghurst.” The Critical Review 36 (1996): 3-18.

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A typical Hollinghurst character, like him, is an only child. Often, his creations seem to stand on the edge of things, keen to engage with the melee, convivial, socially adept and alive to the currents between people, and yet happy to retreat to their own company when needed. There must be a link, surely? 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. Many of Ronald Firbank's books are mentioned – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Valmouth, Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, among other ones.

Will takes Phil out clubbing at The Shaft. He has not been there for many months and there are vivid descriptions of a night on the gay ‘scene’. Will and Phil drink, dance and meet several gay ‘types’, including a Brazilian bodybuilder. He discovers Arthur, who has been working for his brother Harold, in the bathroom and attempts to have sex with him. Arthur is obviously quite upset, and they part ways.With his passion for Wagner, his enthusiasm for architecture and his cheerful ignorance of much popular culture (although the clubbing means he can display odd flashes of knowledge about garage) Hollinghurst can seem to be a rather austere, Olympian figure. At the match, Will meets Bill: a man he knows from the Corry. Bill is a weightlifter; a large muscular man who coaches teenage boxers. Trapped inside his body, Bill seems a fearful man. He is devoted to Nantwich, his patron, and to the boys he coaches. He is also carrying a torch for Phil. 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.