The Swimming-Pool Library is a 1988 novel by Alan Hollinghurst. Plot introduction In 1983 London, Will, a privileged, gay, sexually irresistible 25-year-old, saves the life of an elderly aristocrat who has a heart-attack in a public lavatory. This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family's history. Plot summary William Beckwith is a highly privileged, cultivated and promiscuous young gay man. He is the grandson and heir of Viscount Beckwith, an elder statesman and a recent peer. To avoid death duties, that grandfather has already settled most of his estate on Will, who therefore has substantial private means and no need of work. As the novel opens, Will is currently seeing a young, working-class, black man named Arthur. Will is deeply sexual and physically very attractive. His preoccupation with Arthur is almost entirely physical. Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere. Whilst cruising a young man in a London park, Will enters a public toilet to find a group of older men cottaging. One of them suddenly suffers what is perhaps a minor heart attack and collapses. Will applies artificial respiration and saves the man's life. He returns home to find Arthur bleeding and terrified. Arthur has accidentally killed a friend of his brother Harold's, after an argument about drugs. Will agrees to shelter Arthur. At the Corry, Will meets the old man again and learns that he is Lord (Charles) Nantwich. Charles invites Will to lunch at Wicks': his club. Wicks' is filled with men "of fantastic seniority". Will studied history at Oxford, getting a 2.1 rather than the first that he says had been expected of him. Trapped in close confinement with Arthur, Will begins to resent him. Their boredom and tension occasionally erupts in bouts of sex. Will goes to a cinema that shows gay pornography and has anonymous sex. On the train home, Will reads Valmouth, a novel by Ronald Firbank, given to him by his best friend, James. James is a hard-working doctor who is insecure and sexually frustrated as a gay man. The novel by Firbank echoes themes central to The Swimming-Pool Library; secrets and discretion; extreme old age,