Our Evenings (2024)
Why this one?
I loved both The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. It’s slightly unforgivable that I’ve never got around to reading his other novels (even though I have most of them) but here’s a new one so why not?
Alan James Hollinghurst (1954-; active 1975-), was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England. The son of a bank manager & former WW2 RAF officer, he attended the feei paying Canford School in Dorset before studying English at Magdalen College, Oxford. While there he shared a house with future poet laureate Andrew Motion and wrote his thesis on Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley, three gay writers.
In the late seventies he was a lecturer at Oxford, moving to UCL in the early 80s, and was deputy editor on the Times Literary Supplement from 1985 to 1990. His literary career began with poetry, for which he won the Newdigate Prize in 1974, and his first novel (of just six to date), The Swimming Pool Library, wasn't published until 1988. He was first nominated for the Booker Prize for his second, The Folding Star, and won in 2004 for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child was also longlisted in 2011.
Our Evenings will be published by Picador / Pan Macmillan in October this year. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Our Evenings has a lot about it that will be familiar to Hollinghurst fans. Its protagonist, David Win, is a mixed-race child of a single parent, from the lower middle classes (his mother runs a small dressmaking business) in rural Southern England. He is a scholar at a prestigious fee-paying boys’ school, the recipient of an exhibition awarded by the arts benefactor Mark Harlow. The novel’s early chapters detail events during David’s time at that school, including a weekend at the Harlows’ country home, and an adventurous school ‘challenge’ in which he is paired with the Harlows’ son Giles (who we know from the book’s flash-forward introduction is to become a notorious right-wing politician and Brexit architect). David makes his way in life, developing an interest in acting and generally doing reasonably (if unspectacularly) well, all the while contending with his points of difference.
Like most Hollinghurst protagonists, his class and sexuality set him apart, but here it is his half-Burmese heritage that attracts most attention. With limited knowledge of his father, and never having visited his father’s homeland, he has limited connection to that side of his heritage, but for many people that encounter him over the decades, it’s the first or only thing they see. Throughout the book, David is subject to slights and microagressions which he mostly takes as par for the course. Those who meet his white mother are constantly perplexed and occasionally angered by his presence, at school he ends up friends by default with the only other Asian boy in his year, despite them having little in common, and later in life he is fetishized by some of his white lovers, and in his acting career constantly mistaken for a more famous (but much shorter!) British-Chinese actor.
Unlike some of Hollinghurst’s best-known work, it has as its focus the events of recent years. This may not be apparent for much of the book, which begins in the 1960s and spends much of its time (as is customary for Hollinghurst) in other late twentieth century decades. But it is signposted with its recent-past introduction, and made very apparent in its later pages, which I won’t go into in too much detail as there be serious spoilers down that route. It’s safe to say though that the book shows in its later stages that one of its primary interests is an exploration of what has really changed over these decades when it comes to discrimination in Britain, particularly race-based discrimination. Brexit is there as a signifier of some of this, though its incporporation is subtle and impactful where it could easily have been heavy-handed.
Giles, the figure we hear discussed at the start of the book, ultimately plays a little less obviously significant a role than one might expect from that bit of seemingly obvious foreshadowing. As David himself observes, there are long periods of his life in which Giles plays no role at all, and their paths do not cross. When they do, they offer brief windows into how their lives have diverged, but nothing earth-shattering. What Giles does act as is a shadowy figure lurking in the background, representative of fairly unpleasant undercurrents in British society that may look like they’ve gone away, but are always lurking just below the surface, ready to reemerge at unpredictable and occasionally shocking moments.
Rather than the expected closure to the framing device opened at the start of the book, it is closed with an altogether different frame, and one which encourages a fresh reassessment of the moments that are presented in the book. Again, it’s not right to give too much away about this, but it’s definitely a book that you’ll want to pick up again to read in a fresh light following its conclusion. On a first read, I was somewhat intrigued by the rapid lurches between time periods represented by each chapter. Unlike in other ‘historical sweep’ novels, we’re given little in the way of information (such as dates and locations) as to where we have landed at the start of each section, which typically begins in media res at some point not necessarily obviously related to what came before. It’s only with the context of the novel’s conclusion that we start to make sense of why (and by whom) the particular fragments might have been chosen, and what they illustrate in terms of understanding the path leading to that conclusion.
I found this structural shiftiness to be a highlight of an already very enjoyable read. I had some initial doubts about Hollinghurst being the right person to write David Win’s story, given the central importance of race, but to my (white male) eyes he has handled a challenging perspective with significant success, with its narrative of difference handled with real insight and empathy. (It’s probably also the case that I am the wrong person to judge this, in which case I am happy to stand corrected). Beyond this, it’s all good. The book’s central characters (David, his mother and her partner, and David’s various lovers) are typically three dimensional, vulnerable and relatable. Its interactions with history are lightly handled and occasionally amusing (such as the brief recurrence of Mrs. Thatcher, in rather less dramatic a context than her scene-stealing cameo in The Line of Beauty). Its musings on life and love are tender and beautiful. But it’s the novel’s unexpected ending that I think elevates it to another level in terms its relevance to our modern world.
Score
9
I was never not going to like this, really.
Next up
Can I squeeze in something else before I start picking through the Booker longlist? We shall see!
