The carpets are beige – I feel an urge to remove my shoes; the walls white; each picture, each object, has its place; a cleaner is doing her weekly rounds – young, dark-haired, Spanish perhaps, the most beautiful cleaner you have ever seen. There is absolute silence, broken only by a loud burst of the overture to Swan Lake on Hollinghurst's mobile phone when his mother calls. As well as Tchaikovsky's lush ballet scores, he has an enduring love of Henry James – there is a bookcase of Jamesiana in his top-floor study. James became his art; forswore life to write perfect fictions. My immediate suspicion is that the pupil is taking the same course as the master, though I accept it is a large thesis to hang on beige furnishings. At the Corry, Will is attracted to Phil, a young bodybuilder. Despite his physique, Phil is shy and a sexual novice. Will suspects that Phil is the man with whom he had sex in the cinema. Not knowing a hell of a lot about gay life or the gay community (in Britain or anywhere else) or British fiction, I feel this is something I can't really comment on.

Will continues reading Charles's diaries. On the way to a boxing club financially supported by Nantwich, Will has an unpleasant encounter with a working class boy, who offers him sex for money. Will refuses; there are undertones of fear and violence.I wish I could quote more but already there is a lot going on. Hollinghurst takes a cliché of romantic fiction and gives it several ironic twists. The cliché in this case is that of the serial philanderer who meets our heroine and is reformed by love. Here the philanderer is a gay man. This is a beautiful twist. But he is also the narrator, which is another twist. We are asked to identify with the philanderer. To make it even more piquant, the philanderer is an aristocratic English gentleman who has been brought up in the finest English traditions – the traditions of queazy tums and other feeble excuses. Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details – In contrast to the excellent Line of Beauty, which takes place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Swimming Pool Library is set in the early 1980s at which time it was apparently still possible to have daily unprotected sex with strangers with no adverse physical health effects other than the occasional beating by right-wing skinheads. Not as fun as it sounds if this book is anything to go by. Through Nantwich's diary, the novel is also concerned with the lives of gay men before the gay liberation movement, both in London and in the colonies of the British Empire.

How did you do the arrows?' I interrupted, remembering Mishima's arduous posing in a self-portrait as Sebastian. Will takes Phil out clubbing at The Shaft. He has not been there for many months and there are vivid descriptions of a night on the gay ‘scene’. Will and Phil drink, dance and meet several gay ‘types’, including a Brazilian bodybuilder. He discovers Arthur, who has been working for his brother Harold, in the bathroom and attempts to have sex with him. Arthur is obviously quite upset, and they part ways.and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever is some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own." 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.

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.In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other, with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine." 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."

the title is laughable. the narrator's constant presence at the local english equivalent of the ymca swimming pool is metaphorically (?) tied to his dreamy past hooking up with guys in the school swimming pool, both of which are thematically (?) linked up with Lord Nantwich's rather more hedonistic private pool. that is some serious over-reaching there, hollinghurst. 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.

Retailers:

Rupert has been told to watch out for Arthur; he reports that he has seen him with his brother Harold. I read this book because it's on a lot of "Best Gay Novel" lists. At first I thought it made the lists because there's a ton of sex in it. Maybe that's part of it. Hollinghurst's large flat, spread over three floors, overlooks the southern edge of Hampstead Heath. He lives alone – he generally has, though there have been "periods of experiment" with live-in partners – and the flat feels monastic. "I'm not at all easy to live with," he says. "I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods. It's all become more of a challenge. I find writing novels gets harder and harder, which is not what I thought would happen. I thought you'd learn how to do it." Though he always had a novel "on the go", Hollinghurst initially saw himself as a poet. He published a well-received volume of poetry with the provocative title Confidential Chats With Boys in 1982, but says the muse deserted him in 1985 on the day he signed a contract for a book of poems with Faber. In any case, by then the novel that was to establish him was well under way.