Book Review
Our Evenings
by Alan Hollinghurst
I’ll start at the end and say that when I finished reading Our Evenings I felt quite bereft. I can’t recall when I was last so invested in the lives of fictional people. Some tears were shed.
In his seventh novel, Alan Hollinghurst writes the life of Dave Win, from youth to old age, roughly 60 years. Like most Hollinghurst protagonists, Dave is gay and middle-class, an outsider to British power and privilege. He’s also a person of colour, the son of a white English mother and a Burmese father he has never known.
Dave’s first cue to his difference arrives on the cusp of puberty, when he commences a scholarship to a local public school. The ‘Exhibition’, as it’s called, is funded by left-wing plutocrats, Mark and Cara Hadlow, who encourage Dave like a son. That’s important in two ways: because Dave doesn’t know his own father, and because the Hadlows’ son, Giles, mutates from a bully into a divisive Tory politician and champion of Brexit. An Oxford education awaits, but Dave’s true love is acting; the theatre is a hospitable space where he nevertheless finds roles are limited because of his skin colour. Politics happens in the background, humming along, muted. England evolves then deteriorates. Society and lives are changed. Much is suggested by what is barely said.
Our Evenings is a big book where life is measured by small details – ordinary evenings spent in the company of another, listening to music, cooking dinner, talking, closing out the day. Those details accumulate profoundly across nearly 500 pages into a seamless fabric of highs and lows, loves and losses. And it moves at a pace; I read deep into my evenings, compelled by its intelligence and emotional rhythms, its subtle observations and humour.
In many ways, this is a conventional novel; like all of Hollinghurst’s work, there’s little formal experimentation. But I don’t raise this as criticism. He makes writing seem completely effortless. Our Evenings is a masterclass of characterisation, restraint, and compassion, and certainly one of the outstanding novels of the year.
