I feel like I have nothing to say about this book. Nonetheless I'm going to write a review, because this is what I do. You have been warned. to me, this sealed the deal on such an eloquent way an otherwise, seemingly trashy novel becomes a timeless work; and in itself, I believe, is something that will be linked to by future novelists

The theme is emphasised and its general applicability is tested by passages in the novel which deal with the work of the generation of artists who did their work in the closeted pre-Wolfenden climate. If the idea of ‘homosexual writing’ is useful, it probably applies best to the period when homosexuality was criminal, and hence when the fictional treatment of same-sex love had to be implicit, indirect, deflected, latent. Hollinghurst’s unpublished M. Litt thesis, which I stumbled across as a graduate student, made a forceful case for this idea as applied to the work of Firbank, Hartley and Forster. His novel takes up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The novel’s chief fault lies in its (confessedly) autobiographical nature. There are problems with the shape of the story and with the liberating climax of the Stonewall riot, which does not feel at all achieved in fictional terms: it just happens. Perhaps White’s point is that the central events of our lives can seem curiously downbeat as they are occuring – but at the same time the narrator goes out of his way to say how excited he was by the events at the Stonewall, so that explanation will not quite hold. Will talks on the phone with Gavin, his brother in law. Gavin tells Will that he knew it was Will's grandfather who imprisoned Charles. A past perhaps so distant that the archaeologist knows it where the historian does not. The group interchanged chants of “shame on ACC”, “save our libraries” and “save our swimming pool” as councillors got their Wednesday morning meeting underway. Beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions.It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction's solid grace' - The New York Times Book Review

Stroud might have been terminally inhibiting for the young Hollinghurst, but he escaped. At eight his "aspirational" parents took the curious decision to send him to prep school as a boarder. "Neither of my parents had been to boarding school, but they thought it was important," he says vaguely. From there, he went to Canford public school in Dorset, also as a boarder, and it proved an artistic awakening. "Being in a beautiful and interesting old house made a profound impression on me at an early stage." The decision to send him away was to be the making of the young aesthete, as well as the beginning of the remarkable voice. It was a place I loved, a gloomy and functional underworld full of life, purpose and sexuality. Boys, from the age of seventeen, could go there to work on their bodies in the stagnant, aphrodisiac air of the weights room. As you got older, it grew dearer, but quite a few men of advanced years, members since youth and displaying the drooping relics of toned-up pectorals, still paid the price and tottered in to cast an appreciative eye at the showering youngsters.” 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. 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."

The Stranger's Child – the title comes from Tennyson's In Memoriam – is Hollinghurst's fifth novel, and his first since The Line Of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004. His first four books, written over a span of almost 20 years, form a quartet that explore gay life in the UK, present and past. The Swimming-Pool Library, his sex-drenched first book, published in 1988, mapped the gay world before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality; The Folding Star (1994) was a disturbing study of pederastic desire; The Spell (1998) a sex-and-drugs-fuelled comedy of manners; The Line Of Beauty another dark comedy exposing the hypocrisy and cupidity of the 1980s.

Swimming Pools

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. Phil, the second of William's boyfriends in the book, met at the Corry. He lives in the dingy staff quarters of a famous hotel and likes to read. Auden, Wystan Hugh. The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber, 1953. Secondly, I couldn't quite relate to Will. We're very different in character and personality, and that also lessens my enjoyment of a book. He rarely did things I downright disagreed with, but I didn't feel strongly connected to him either. I guess there were things I didn't understand and didn't share with him. 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."

Yes, it’s a paradoxical thing, isn’t it?” he replies. “I did have that sense that I was very fortunate in a way, coming along just as gay lit as a genre was really coming into its own, and finding there was this whole fascinating, unexplored world to write about. But then of course that was in the wake of gay liberation and various social and political changes; and then of course the great crisis of Aids was the second stage of that – it gave gay writing a new, unanticipated subject.” Many of Ronald Firbank's books are mentioned – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Valmouth, Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, among other ones.Not that it’s a grim book. White writes too exuberantly for the effect of his work ever to be really lowering, and even though The beautiful room is empty is him in a comparatively austere vein, he is still wonderfully attentive to every sentence. Here, for instance, is the narrator mastering the technique of looking at Abstract Expressionist paintings. The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic debut' - The Guardian