posted on 20 May 2019

The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, published in 1988, caused quite a stir on its release because of its bold and graphic descriptions of gay sex at a time when society was gripped by its first, rudimentary awareness of the threat of AIDS. The idea that HIV/AIDS was in some way a ‘gay plague’ had become a popular misconception of the time and added to a general ratchetting-up of discrimination and mistrust towards the gay community.

By setting his novel in 1983, Hollinghurst is able to use the emergence of HIV/AIDS as an unspoken spectre at the feast – a sort of terrible looming cloud that we are privileged to know about but which is heading unheeded and unseen towards the book’s characters.

As the author himself has acknowledged, and as his later books also confirm, he’s fascinated to the point of obsession with the rich, the privileged and the upper class and this book is no exception to that. His central character, William Beckwith who is our unreliable narrator, is from a titled, well-heeled family and he makes the most of it. Handsome, young, raffish and utterly dedicated to hedonistic gay sex, Beckwith drifts into casual relationships, exploits people and has no sense of purpose other than the next trick.

But Beckwith’s life isn’t entirely insulated from the rest of society and his search for gratification and for what he calls ‘love’ – the search for someone to go to for emotional stability – bring him into contact with the working class who inject a sort of frightening  reality into his world. He finds himself enchanted by Arthur, a young black man who he lusts after but doesn’t really like and certainly doesn’t understand and when Arthur’s world is revealed as a violent and abusive one, Beckwith finds ways to distance himself. He also falls for a hotel worker, Phil, who he sets up as his steady relationship but who ultimately abandons him for someone older and significantly, someone of his own class. He’s also viciously beaten up for being gay by a group of skinheads he encounters on a housing estate ( a rather stereotypical encounter with the working class in that case) and finds himself appalled by his discovery that other workers at the Hotel Queensbury are part of a seedy gay porn film ring.

But Beckwith’s journey to some kind of understanding of what you might call the politics of being gay comes from what seems to be a chance encounter with an older man whose life he saves in a public lavatory. This turns out to be Charles, Lord Nantwich who, seemingly in gratitude for this act, takes William under his wing and asks him to write his biography. The briefcase full of papers and manuscripts that William reads form a sizeable chunk of the book’s text and give us a glimpse into what gay upper-class life was like before consensual gay sex was legalised and makes a stark counterpoint with the promiscuity of William’s London life.

Beckwith with no other obvious job to detain him, takes on the task of reading and ordering the papers in a rather lackadaisical fashion but finds himself drawn into the life of a man who lived an elite upbringing but still found himself a victim of schoolboy rape, a colonial administrator, a gay rake in World War Two and ultimately a victim of harsh post-war legislation against homosexuality that sends him to prison. As if to underline the colliding of the worlds of William and Charles, the man who was responsible for the strict application of repressive post-war legislation turns out to be a member of William’s family.

The treatment meted out to Charles alerts William to something he’s been turning a blind eye to – that all is far from well with the way society sees the gay community and far from well when it comes to his own awareness. The understanding that he’s part of an unfinished history is made solid by the travails of his best friend, James who has been entrapped for soliciting gay sex by a policeman – an event that could have come directly from the experiences of Charles thirty years earlier.

This is a complex novel but written with a sort of fearless grace that makes it compelling and even more so at a distance of another thirty years. There are, I think, technical flaws here as you might expect with a first novel – many of the working class characters are stereotypically two dimensional and the draft papers written by Charles are, I think, way too stylistically fluent and excellently structured to convince the reader that they are diary entries or jottings. But these are forgivable faults for a writer determined to be true to his mission of frank and unapologetic prose that tackles some of the truths of being gay in late 20th century Britain.

 

Terry Potter

May 2019