Introduction

Lord Charles Nantwich, the eccentric octogenarian of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library, is certainly not lacking in unusual habits. In his world, phone calls are ended in midsentence, household staff are recruited from among the recently paroled, and the answers to crossword clues are the ‘words which aren’t the answers’:

‘Oh, I don’t do the clues,’ he said, in a tone of voice and with a little downward slap of the hand which conveyed tired contempt, an almost political feeling of disaffection. ‘No, no, no,’ he smiled; ‘I do the alternative crossword, as they call things nowadays. You have to fill in words which aren’t the answers. It’s much more difficult. It’s a kind of solitaire, you see, you have to make a clean sweep of it. And then often, I’m afraid, you get buggered in the last corner.’

I nodded and thought about this. ‘You could invent a word, then, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, let’s,’ said Charles. (SPL 165–6)