The Swimming Pool Library

By: Alan Hollinghurst

Narrated by: Samuel West

Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.

©2006 Alan Hollinghurst (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"West has a lot of fun with the waspishly clever dialogue, and, provided you ensure it's not overheard by listeners of delicate sensibilities, this is terrific to listen to." (Karen Robertson, The Sunday Times)

Well-written, tragic story; confusing (at times) narration

The story itself is well written. The first-person main character is fully realized: flawed, compulsive, shallow, unfaithful…yet not entirely unredeemable, despite how we suspect he feels about himself.

And the story, eventually covering as it does the first four-fifths of the 20th century, is expertly told, with details and allusions and language that immerses us completely into the underground (at first) and eventually overt world of “the homosexual.” The sex is graphic and frequent (this being the main character’s compulsive and primary occupation), but the story is tragic on so many levels: the many lives destroyed by the various legal proscriptions against gay sex; social opprobrium against the same (although this book makes higher society’s hypocrisy on the issue apparent); the seeming futility of loving relationships between men during this time due to the erosions caused by legal and social disapprovals; and finally, just off-stage of this story, waiting in the wings, is the specter of AIDS. For the reader, at least, it’s hard not imagine many of these characters dead within a few years even though, written as it is in the first person, there is no intimation of the epidemic set to decimate a generation or two of gay men.

The narrator of the audio book does an otherwise excellent job EXCEPT: several lengthy passages are from diaries written by another character 60 to 30 years before the story’s main action. The narrator (otherwise able to deliver accents to distinguish characters) makes no distinction between the diary entries and the contemporary narration. As a result, it was often difficult to tell when a diary entry had ended and the contemporary narration had resumed. I checked out the digital copy of this book from my library to follow along primarily to avoid this confusion. Having a text version of the book was also handy for some British slang and other terms I needed to see to understand in context.

Hollinghurst's first and among the best.

If you could sum up The Swimming Pool Library in three words, what would they be?

great period piece

What did you like best about this story?

Listening to it twenty years after reading it made me realize how much I had changed. It's a great description of upper class British life. Hollinghurst's lush writing is in full bloom.

What does Samuel West bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Sam West's narration makes this an good example of listening surpassing reading. His Lord Nantwich is spot on. It's Hollinghurst's ear for British language that provides such great material. Sam brings the fellow to life.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Gay England in the late 20th century.

Fun & Interesting, with lots of steamy bits!

Samuel West keeps this story interesting and going through great definition of character. Not sure where the plot was always going, or even if there was a plot, more like the meanderings of the main character's thoughts. Lots of great sex, vivid and colorful romp into gay life. Kind of a refreshing journey to be taken on to a time forgotten, how carefree the 80's actually were. Hollinghurst is an interesting writer who puts the most interesting spin on the most banal circumstances. Totally enjoyed all the way through. It's a great book to listen to while you garden.

A meandering journey

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. The storyline goes on without much point, but the emotion, feeling and self absorption of the main character is very interesting.

Magnificent

A lush and honest look at gay life over the last century, and the threads of love that bind us

great read!

I adore this book - multi-layered, full of allusions to set and literature, there's a lot of sex, and a lot of musing about sex, but I wouldn't call it a vulgar book by any means. like most Hollinghurst books the main character is a brilliant English gay man. in this one he's delightfully vain, superficial, yet has a poignsnt quality as well

Strong stuff

Swimming Pool Library is beautifully written and will give you a vivid picture of the life depicted. As a straight man I endeavored to give all the gay sexuality the same distance I gave the sexuality of "straight" characters whose taste differs from mine--cf. Lolita or anything by Pynchon. But don't think you can just skim over it and get back to the plot. Gay sexuality is THE subject of this book.

Excellent reader.

Oh the English!

Delightful proper English & a glimpse into those bygone times when it was dangerous in England to be queer. We are relentless in our pursuit of sex & happiness!

Hollinghurt’s best

This is undoubtedly Hollinghurts best novel, and one of my favorite books all time. Too bad the rest of his books are drivel. This is very well narrated as an audio book

Excellent reading

As almost always, West delivers an ideal performance.

That’s said, I’m intrigued by recent-ish reader/listener reviews of this novel, here and even more on GoodReads, etc., readers who seem to to me to “misunderstand” the novel’s narrative approach (the plot even) and simply react with disgust toward the character of Beckwith as if that’s their enlightened reading against the text. Some of this is no doubt due to homophobia colliding with uni requirements to read gay texts, some of it is inevitable cancel culture echos, but not all of it. My idea of the novel is, I think, in line with/shaped by how the novel was reviewed in 1988 and subsequently discussed in academia and the media. But I don’t know—I do suspect many of us might be a bit more “Beckwithian”, a bit more complicit than should make us comfortable. After all, despite the subsequent AIDS years, Beckwith isn’t quite right to claim the world he narrates came to an end in 1983.