The Swimming Pool Library
First edition
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| Author | Alan Hollinghurst |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
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Publication date
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22 Feb 1988 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) & audio book |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 17841394 |
The Swimming-Pool Library is a 1988 novel by Alan Hollinghurst.
In 1983 London, the privileged, gay, and sexually irresistible 25-year-old protagonist Will saves the life of an elderly aristocrat having a heart-attack in a public lavatory. This chance meeting sets in process a chain of events that will ultimately require the highly intelligent but essentially carefree Will to substantially re-evaluate his sense of the past and of his family's history.
The title has at least three meanings.
As recounted at the beginning of chapter 7, at William's unspecified prep school, prefects were known as 'librarians', the designation often taking a prefix to indicate the particular prefect's area of responsibility. Will, a keen swimmer at school as afterwards, became the 'Swimming-Pool Librarian'. His father, writing to offer congratulation, amusedly comments, 'you must tell me what kind of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.' For Will, the Swimming-Pool Library is slang for the changing-room to which he and his friends would slip in the middle of the night for illicit sexual activities.
Also, at Charles Nantwich's home there is a room that has served as a library and was once a Roman bath.
And, Will borrows trashy homoerotic novels from one of the lifeguards at the Corinthian club. The club, then, is a swimming pool library.
William Beckwith is a highly privileged, cultivated and promiscuous young gay man. He is the grandson and heir of Viscount Beckwith, an elder statesman and a recent peer. To avoid death duties, that grandfather has already settled most of his estate on Will, who therefore has substantial private means and no need of work.
As the novel opens, we learn that Will is currently seeing a young, working-class, black man named Arthur. Will is deeply sexual and physically very attractive. His preoccupation with Arthur is almost entirely physical.
Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere.
Whilst cruising a young man in a London park, Will enters a public toilet to find a group of older men cottaging. One of them suddenly suffers what is perhaps a minor heart attack and collapses. Will applies artificial respiration and saves the man's life. He returns home to find Arthur bleeding and terrified. Arthur has accidentally killed a friend of his brother Harold's, after an argument about drugs. Will agrees to shelter Arthur.
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