The Swimming-Pool Library

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While much of the detail about gay life is surely historically accurate, there is some romanticization of gay society (socialization?) too. I have trouble believing a boys' boarding school was really such a regular orgy of teen boy assignations.

They banged drums, trying to make as much noise as possible, as people shared memories about what the facilities meant to them and their families. But Hollinghurst’s novels, including his latest, The Sparsholt Affair, which ranges from 1940 to the present day and features a kaleidoscope of narratives, require expansiveness and the sense of a large canvas on which to unfold; he needs a certain airiness to contrast with his focus on his characters’ intimate, and often secret, lives. In his last novel, The Stranger’s Child, he began just before the first world war and moved forwards to explore the effect of a sexually charismatic young poet over subsequent decades. The Sparsholt Affair also employs that novel’s five-part structure, with jumps in time and perspective and narrative gaps carefully exploited to maximise mystery and ambiguity. Will goes to Phil's hotel. He encounters a rich Argentine who propositions him. Will accepts until he finds that the man is obsessed with gay pornographic conventions, costumes and sex toys. Will finds this all slightly ridiculous and is not aroused. He refuses to consent to sex and leaves. I found Hollinghurst's novel to be very enthralling and wonderfully erotic. It's such a fantastic exploration of what it was like to be a part of the gay community in the early 1980s, before AIDS altered the community and its image forever.What a steaming pile of turd. I thought the Line Of Beauty was rubbish, but at least there was darkness hiding amongst the explicit sex. The Swimming Pool Library has nothing of the sort. Described by some as an elegy to the pre AIDS homosexual world, this was a tale without a single likeable character, with no human bases I could touch down with whatsoever. Perhaps it's because there isn't a single woman in this book. Perhaps it's because the main character is one of those awful dying breeds of monied posh sorts who can do nothing with their lives and still live them quite handsomely. Perhaps it's the attitude of "well, if they ban us here, let's just take our exciting news ideas to the sub continent and have our way with people who have no recourse to do anything about it." At the Corry, Will is attracted to Phil, a young bodybuilder. Despite his physique, Phil is shy and a sexual novice. Will suspects that Phil is the man with whom he had sex in the cinema. Will continues reading Charles's diaries. On the way to a boxing club financially supported by Nantwich, Will has an unpleasant encounter with a working class boy, who offers him sex for money. Will refuses; there are undertones of fear and violence. Hollinghurst's large flat, spread over three floors, overlooks the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. He lives alone – he generally has, though there have been "periods of experiment" with live-in partners – and the flat feels monastic. "I'm not at all easy to live with," he says. "I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods. It's all become more of a challenge. I find writing novels gets harder and harder, which is not what I thought would happen. I thought you'd learn how to do it."

But those who know him insist that underneath the erudition and the witty, high-camp banter, he is emotional; indeed, that he's a person of particularly deep emotion. 'He's a loving person,' says Alan Jenkins. 'He's very loyal. He's not promiscuous: he falls in love with people and he's had terrible heartbreaks and unhappiness. Love and affection is very central in his life and I'm sure he'd like that to figure in his domestic life.' White’s narrators tend to feel the provisionality of their own personalities in relation to their environment: they watch other people carefully and have the skills of survivors – sensitiveness to mood, eagerness to please, readiness to dissimulate. What is made clearer by The beautiful room is empty is the way in which White’s interest in how we invent ourselves is a political concern. The unnamed narrator (the same one as in A Boy’s Own Story, to which this is a sequel) describes his education, intellectual and erotic, in the Midwest in the Fifties, and then his arrival and life in New York. The book ends with the Stonewall riot in 1969 – the event which precipitated Gay Liberation, ‘the turning-point of our lives’. The novel tells the story of the gay narrator’s attempt to comprehend his own sexuality in a society which offers no models for understanding that sexuality other than the legal (as a crime) or the medical (as an illness). The narrator, when not giving blowjobs in public lavatories, is attracted to types who are outside the established norms of behaviour – bohemians and artists like his beat friend the Communist lesbian paintress Maria. But America in the late Fifties is a society that places a very high value on the idea of normality, and the cost of the attempt to dissent is high: the narrator’s self-loathing is paralleled in the drug addiction, insanity and suicide of other characters. I wonder if, with the new novel done, he feels bereaved. "Normally, I do have a brief but acute sort of depression when I finish a book, which is to do with saying goodbye to this place you've been inhabiting. But I was so desperate to get this thing off that I seem to have escaped that." He has a deep, drawly voice – so deep he used to be known as Basso Profundo when he worked at the Times Literary Supplement in the 80s – and a hesitant, donnish manner, but his brown eyes sparkle behind his glasses, and he laughs a great deal, managing to take himself very seriously and at the same time not in the least seriously. The fitness studios will host a wide range of group exercise classes including pilates, Zumba, indoor cycling and yoga, as well as several "virtual classes" delivered by video, including Body Pump, Body Combat and Sh'Bam. Ultimately, management hope to see 250,000 visitors come through the doors every year. You can get more Neath news and other story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.

Melksham House Proposals

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. I first read this novel for ‘pleasure’– whatever that means – before I came to Queen Mary, and now at the close of my undergraduate years, I’ve dedicated a year to studying and writing about it. Just as much fun as it was when I read it as a teenager, I decided to revisit it with academic lenses on, focusing on the politics of the 1980s, issues of representation, and invocations of the past. For me, thinking about all of this within a novel I never read in a classroom has been a great way of getting to know it better – and I will excommunicate anyone who says studying a book makes you hate it. What I’ve found is that so much of what I really enjoyed in ‘casually’ reading the novel comes up again and again in what I think provides the potential for ‘formal’, academic discussion. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other, with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine." The first lines of the novel neatly offer the measure of Will, a bright young thing detached from the reality of most people’s lives in Thatcher’s Britain, yet he is physically caught up in the cosmopolitan mix. Hollinghurst makes great use of trains to show off this kind of close detachment, and the Underground often becomes a way for Will to eye-up men or even find a fling: The new facilities will provide a vibrant hub; combining new and improved leisure facilities with the town's library services. which includes:

Upstairs, he discovers Phil having sex with Bill. Disoriented, he leaves and wanders to James's and then the Corry, where Charles Nantwich reveals his designs in giving Will the diaries. Will and James go to Staines's to see a film, not a piece of pornography but an archive recording of Ronald Firbank in old age. The novel closes. Ah, the infamous first person narrator. I’m in his head without a doubt. He’s a protagonist that's difficult to admire, but have such fun in his company regardless. Will and I could never be friends… or could we? Well, to be honest, I don’t think he’d give me the time of day. I wouldn’t be admitted past the front desk of the Corinthian Club (fondly called the Corry) anyway. Besides, that’s not Hollinghurst’s point here. Sensationally sexy. This queer classic is really a historical snapshot of 20th century homosexuality in England. Hollinghurst masterly uses an amusing cast of characters to explore issues of class, wealth, race, identity and sexuality and its bit of a mystery and quite a lot of fun discovering how connected their lives are. Many novelists do journalism to top up their earnings. Hollinghurst does the odd book review and literary essay, but he doesn't do punditry. Isn't he tempted? "No," he says, "I don't really have opinions. After The Line Of Beauty, I was always getting requests from newspapers, asking me what the election meant for Labour, that sort of thing. I said I didn't have the faintest idea what the election meant for Labour. I just happened to have written a book that had a Tory politician in it." What's he having?' I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass.Bradley, John. “Disciples of St Narcissus: In Praise of Alan Hollinghurst.” The Critical Review 36 (1996): 3-18. You can also see an artist's visualisation of how the completed building will look in the document below: The gym is open from 6.15am to 9.30pm from Monday to Friday and from 8am to 7pm on weekends. Gym-goers are asked to book-in for a session in advance. (Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne)

the title is laughable. the narrator's constant presence at the local english equivalent of the ymca swimming pool is metaphorically (?) tied to his dreamy past hooking up with guys in the school swimming pool, both of which are thematically (?) linked up with Lord Nantwich's rather more hedonistic private pool. that is some serious over-reaching there, hollinghurst. And what about now? “The distinctive purpose of gay writing, its political purpose or its novelty or its urgency have gone, and the gay world, as it changes, is perhaps not so stimulating to a fiction writer like me,” he says – although he’s careful to make clear he’s talking about his own writing rather than issuing blanket statements. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be written about.” Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details – 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.

A Changing Places facility (opens new window)which will provide excellent personal care facilities for those who cannot use standard public toilets, making the campus accessible for everyone. I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be communicated, but in silence." 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.