What I’m Reading 2

Encouraged by reviews that suggest there is less sex than in his previous novels, I have started Alan Hollinghurt’s The Stranger’s Child. The sex has always seemed essential with Hollinghurst so it’ll be interesting to see how he does without it, or with less of it. Not a page went by in The Swimming Pool Library without a swelling crotch (or two) and there can be very few more highly sexed men in literature than the young aesthete narrator William Beckwith, for whom the word promiscuous doesn’t do the remotest justice.

With a less gifted writer so much sex would get in the way, but the brilliance of Hollinghurst is that the hunt for sex and the quest for love are equally potent, and though intertwined the latter somehow survives unsullied. It would be a great shame to allow the sheer volume of sodomitical goings-on to deter you from reading TSPL, because between the incessant buggery is a brilliant, elegiac portrait of the troublingly nostalgic friendship between Beckwith and the his wry, balding, sentimental school friend James Brook. Brook is one of literature’s great fringe characters. Posed in deliberate opposition to Beckwith, with his vitality and vigor, Brook is fading and alone:

‘…it’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone.’

And then the moment, underlined in my volume, when the mysterious Lord Nantwich (who, at the beginning of the book, Beckwith resuscitates in a public lavatory when the Peer suffers a heart attack whilst cottaging) returns home with flowers to be told by his lover and manservant Taha that he is to marry a woman:

‘So the Chrysanthemums – in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis - swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future…now heartlessly splendid’.