A chance discovery that the novelist Alan Hollinghurst has a new book coming out in the Autumn of 2024 has prompted me to begin a retrospective of the Hollinghurst ‘oeuvre’ of six novels, beginning with his 1988 debut masterpiece, The Swimming-Pool Library. (What will become his seventh is currently ‘Untitled’ on some websites, ‘Our Evenings’ according to others, the latter making me keep my fingers crossed that a third option, more inspiring or just easier to say, actually makes it to the cover).

Re-reading The Swimming-Pool Library for the first time in over thirty years has been a very rewarding experience. The depiction of the life of a gay man, both in the time before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967 (the day before I was born, as it happens) and also shortly before the scourge of Aids took its terrible toll, is described with unapologetic boldness and in Hollinghurst’s (now) trademark brilliant style. John Maier, writing in ‘The Times’ in 2021, could not hide his joy in both the novel’s subject matter nor its author’s prose:

William Beckwith, Hollinghurst’s protagonist, cruises, more or less literally, through life, picking up men wherever he finds them: in hotel bars, in X-rated cinemas and on the Underground. Beckwith is handsome, clever and (nouveau) rich. He is also lusty and lustful, a delinquent 25-year-old Wykehamist…an irresistible, dissipated character. Like a figure drawn from a Hogarth engraving, he makes a rakish progress through a series of raunchy tableaux, in his case centred on the all-male Corinthian Club, where he swims and indulges the general atmosphere of amused mutual appreciation. (“In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the [showers] to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.” “Foolish perfection” — isn’t that terrific?)

The novel also has an excellent plot which coyly hides itself for a long while, from the protagonist as much as from the reader. 

A contemporaneous review of The Swimming-Pool Library in the ‘London Review of Books’  is by John Lanchester, whose own first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, in my opinion, he has yet to better in subsequent works. Lanchester’s review of Hollinghurst (and secondly Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty) doesn’t miss a beat, from the excellent title ‘Catch 28’ to the excoriating denunciation of the infamous clause of the Local Government Act 1988, from which the review gets its clever name.

Section or Clause 28 had just come into force when Lanchester was writing his review and stated that local authorities ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality…or promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

Just typing that takes my breath away – and the fact that it was not removed from the statute book until 2003 – so I’m leaving the final word to Lanchester (before continuing my Hollinghurst retrospective with The Folding Star):

Of course, the clause is so badly drafted that no one quite knows what its practical consequences will be. The ban on spending public money on the ‘promotion’ of those positive images [of homosexuality] might affect anything from the acquisition of library books to the licensing of cinemas. It is very likely to prevent council support for specifically gay causes – helplines and counselling services included. Even if the clause knew what it were doing – even if, say, it were narrowly and effectively drafted with the sole purpose of preventing the appearance on school library lists of Cordelia lives with Roger and Abdul, or whatever – it would be a stupid and pernicious piece of legislation. But there is something especially depressing in the way the clause seems to bungle away our liberties. It entrusts them to the courts and to the mad mullahs who preside in them.