Our Evenings
Alan Hollinghurst
Our Evenings
Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age.
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.
As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.
Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
Review
Joanna Di Mattia
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.
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