The Swimming-Pool Library

My original post for The Swimming-Pool Library was written after drinking about two thirds of a bottle of red wine on an empty stomach.  Needless to say, it’s not a masterpiece.  Furthermore, it was scrawled in a notebook on a train, so it’s pretty hard to read.  So it could be a masterpiece, who knows.  The hand writing’s pretty illegible.  The train drinking also meant I missed out on some of the finer points of the last two chapters.  Which I think might have been a bit of a shame, as they’re definitely the best ones plot-wise.  Things happen in them other than ridiculous amounts of sex.

There is a lot of sex in this book.  I’m not particularly convinced that it’s a realistic amount of sex.  Granted, I don’t have Alan Hollinghurst’s experience of being a gay man in 1980s Britain, but I am the same age as the protagonist of the novel and no-one I know is having that much casual sex.  It gets a bit too much at some point.  I’m not sure when it is, but it definitely crosses the line into gratuitous during the course of the novel.  I think that my problem with it is that you can’t even really argue that it is eroticism.  Hollinghurst’s protagonist, spoilt grandson-of-a-Peer William Beckworth proclaims to love his numerous conquests but he doesn’t.  It all feels like surface level lust- not love.  It is, cliché of clichés, a book full of fucking rather than making love.  I feel dirty just having written so corny a sentence.  That’s not a thing I would have written sober.  There is a further problem to all the sex, though- and a more serious one.  William likes young boys- even conceding at one point that 14 isn’t too young; as long as they look older.  It’s a really troubling attitude for the hero of the piece.

I think that’s one of the issue that I really had with the book.  I’m sure that it’s mentioned one point that Will’s boyfriend, Phil is three years away from the age of consent.  And so it gets a bit like that Friends episode- where Monica inadvertently sleeps with a teenager.  It’s just icky.  A lot of the ground covered in this respect is similar to that of The Falling Star but there’s a difference.  Luc is a thing of fantasy, Phil is real and in Will’s bed.  The 25 year-old part of me is appalled by someone sleeping with someone so young; actually all of me is.  It makes 288 pages in Will’s company uncomfortable.

I must, at this point, state that I didn’t the book.  There are amazing parts.  For example, Will at one point is beaten to a pulp by a group of skinheads for looking for his black ex-boyfriend.  Until this point, Will has no grit.  There’s also a wonderful rumination on chronic singledom in the diary of Will’s best friend, James; “I thought of W[ill] already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all… how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself- younger too… [couldn’t] sleep.   Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight.”  I think that might be my favourite part of the book, James is my favourite character by miles.  I understand that, given the ending, Will needs to be of looser morals but James is relatable.  This is a book that involves 83 year-old men making pornos, and James is just a far more believable character than any of the novel’s aristocratic set.

My problem with The Swimming-Pool Library boils down to the issue of privilege.  Will is so entitled and the cost of that is only revealed at the end of the book.  For the vast majority of the book, his existence is enchanted and consequence free and it’s grating after a while to read about a main character like that.  I don’t feel like I can live vicariously through Will and so want a character I can actually relate to.  I want more James.

Next up is J M Coetzee’s Slow Man.