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Book
Alan Hollinghurst · 1988
Hollinghurst sets The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) in the summer of 1983 — the last summer, as the reader knows and the characters do not, before AIDS would change everything — and writes gay London as a world of pleasure shadowed at every turn by the question of who has held power over whom, and who gets punished for it.
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Appears in
What this book knows
Desire in 1983 London is always already shadowed by history: who holds power over whom, and who gets punished for it.
erotic-as-power
I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home.
HOLL-SPL-RC-008He turned me round and spread me out… tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room and yanked down a catering-size drum of corn oil.
HOLL-SPL-RC-275I sensed all the tension in his fixed posture between excitement and fear, and knew that I could do what I wanted.
HOLL-SPL-RC-055obedience-and-authority
He was set up by some pretty policeman—and that's really not another world, Gavin, it's going on in London now almost every day.
HOLL-SPL-RC-277He'd been sent to gaol for six months for soliciting and I think conspiracy to commit indecent acts.
HOLL-SPL-RC-290shame
I thought how I had seen him dead on the lavatory floor. I felt quite fond of him, glad that I had belonged to him and not to the sinister Staines.
HOLL-SPL-RC-047Editor’s framing
The novel braids two stories: the present-day life of a privileged young man moving through a world of swimming pools, clubs, and easy conquest, and the diaries of an elderly peer whose past reaches back into colonial Africa and the prosecutions of an earlier era. The pleasure is rendered without apology and with great precision — Hollinghurst was among the first British literary novelists to write gay sex as fully and unguardedly as anything else — but the book will not let pleasure stand free of history. Power, class, race, and the long memory of persecution sit underneath every encounter.
What to attend to: the dramatic irony the 1983 setting carries, which Hollinghurst could not have engineered but the reader cannot un-know. The way the diaries complicate the narrator's freedom by revealing what an earlier generation paid for it. The elegance of the prose against the unease of what it is describing — the book is beautiful and implicated at once, and refuses to separate the two.
In Vela's reading this sits beside A Boy's Own Story and Another Country as part of the queer-literary inheritance — White writing the adolescent self, Baldwin writing desire under race, Hollinghurst writing desire under class and history. We read it on the erotic-as-power axis above all: it is the book in the canon most concerned with who holds power over whom, and with the cost that question always carries.
Featured passage
‘She might be. She probably wouldn’t take it as seriously as you. I guess it was before either of you was born—I mean it’s another world, thank heavens,’ he hastily emphasised. ‘But if you met Charles Nantwich, who’s the dearest and most extraordinary old boy, you would see that it isn’t another world. He was sent to prison and it’s obviously scarred him or whatever—and he was set up by some pretty policeman, and that’s really not another world, Gavin, it’s going on in London now almost every day.’ After a moment Gavin said: ‘I have met him actually; I think it was more than just the soliciting, there was a conspiracy charge and they raked up all sorts of other stuff. I heard about it originally from old Cecil Hughes when we were doing the London Bridge project. As you perhaps know, Lord Nantwich’s house has a remarkable first-century Roman pavement under it.’ ‘Yes, I’ve seen it—why didn’t I ask you if you knew it?’ ‘Cecil took me to see it then. It’s exceptionally beautiful, don’t you think, with the swimming figures and the Thames deity? It really ought to be removed to somewhere safe.’ ‘I don’t see Charles taking to that idea. But it must be rather damp.’ ‘It’s not only that,’ Gavin said in a strange, camp tone of voice. ‘There are other things. I remember Cecil and I had the distinct impression that orgies or something went on down there: there were candles and old leather-bound books going mouldy, and the queerest smell. And of course those outrageous Otto Henderson doodles on the walls. I must say it was more than a touch embarrassing—though Cecil I think quite enjoyed it.’ ‘I wish I’d talked to you before. There is a whiff of black magic sometimes at Skinner’s Lane.’ ‘I’m not surprised. It’s not my kind of thing. Henderson was said to be mixed up with some sort of spiritualist society himself, and Cecil said something about Nantwich getting in touch with I think a friend who had died tragically. I must say it rather gave me the creeps, as did Nantwich himself. Worth it, for the pavement, though.’ ‘This was before you were married.’ ‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and—I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’ ‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’
‘She might be. She probably wouldn’t take it as seriously as you. I guess it was before either of you was born—I mean it’s another world, thank heavens,’ he hastily emphasised.
Read alongside · the magazine
Hollinghurst's pleasure is rendered fully but never free of history — a case the essay's argument about attention reads against the loud.
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
Reader resonance signals for text sources are not wired to this view yet.
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