The Swimming-Pool Library

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From the diaries, Will learns that Nantwich has been to Egypt and then returned to London, where he met with Ronald Firbank: an extraordinary portrait of effete decrepitude, camp and alcoholic.

You can also see an artist's visualisation of how the completed building will look in the document below: However this book has a moral agenda - sort of, a history lesson and hidden depths. William is approached by Lord Nantwich, a man whose life he had previously saved while loitering in a public lavatory, to write his biography and through the research and reading Nantwich's diaries he uncovers elements of a sad and unpleasant past, previously hidden to him. By this time, Hollinghurst was working at the Times Literary Supplement. There is a sense in his books of life opening up for young people in London, and his friends suggest that this was very much his experience, and that it accelerated following the publication of his first novel.Coming of Age Tales in which the protagonist struggles to come out, often against his unsympathetic surroundings. often tender; occasionally mawkish. Verhaeren. “Le Moulin.” The Penguin Book of French Verse. Eds. Brian Woledge, Geoffrey Brereton and Anthony Hartley. London: Penguin, 1975. 472-73.

Will goes to an exhibition of photographs by Staines. The theme is soft-core homo-erotica. He is surprised to find Gavin there. Talking with Staines, he discovers that he and Charles have produced three pornographic films of the type that play in the cinema where Will first had sex with Phil. The council said library services won’t be downgraded, but moved to nearby ‘hubs’ within local schools.

Melksham House Proposals

Hollinghurst does indeed look tweedy and staid in the school photograph that accompanies his article in the Canfordian. He has described living his life in reverse: hemmed in in his teens and 20s, when he was at Oxford, living in a house with Andrew Motion and doing a thesis on three gay writers, EM Forster, Firbank and LP Hartley, working at a time when it was not possible to write openly about homosexuality; then flowering in his 30s after he came to London. 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. I don’t make moral judgments.” The Guardian, Thursday, October 21, 2004. http:// books. guardian. co. uk/ bookerprize2004/ story/ 0,14182,1332083,00. html there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness.

In a hilarious, though slightly improbable, conversation between the narrator and his six-year-old nephew, the latter, who apparently has been told that Uncle Will is homosexual without really understanding it, is looking at a photo album and asking questions, concluding "I mean, almost everyone is homosexual, aren't they? Boys, I mean." The reply "I sometimes think so" sums up the spirit of this book in which continuous cruising and brief but torrid affairs are literally the sum total of the narrator's existence (abetted by his independent wealth). The heterosexuals (grandfathers and other necessary progenitors) are quite peripheral. The writing, as I mentioned in my Rabbit Is Rich blurb, has a casual elegant brilliance that quite transcends the subject, though as portrait of gay life, it rivals Andrew Holleran's Dancer From The Dance for entertainment value (and no, Larry Kramer's Faggots is not nearly as good). 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? 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. 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:Bradley, John. “Disciples of St Narcissus: In Praise of Alan Hollinghurst.” The Critical Review 36 (1996): 3-18. Another protester Karen Barrett-Ayres said: “I am in recovery from brain surgery and I have reduced mobility. I can’t travel to a library that’s further afield.” and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever is some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own."