“It was only as the story settled and took shape that my own anger came, a kind of delayed revelation. And part of the revelation was that it had taken so long to come. All my life I’d been ambushed, and slow, every time, to stand up for myself.” One of the markers of a great novel is when the reader feels a genuine sense of loss at the end of the book, catharsis in all its purgative relief.
Alan Hollinghurst’s beautifully observed Our Evenings achieves this in elegant fashion, the kind of pathos that stems from intimate acquaintance with a character over a lengthy preceding narrative. In this instance we follow the life of actor David Win, from his atypical childhood in 1960s Home Counties England to old age in post-Brexit Britain.
Of mixed-race heritage, Dave’s early years are spent living with his English mother Avril above her dress shop in the fictional market town of Foxleigh. Little is known of his father, save for a single photograph and his mother’s elliptical story of a brief marriage in Burma to a government official who died shortly after Dave was born, prompting her return home.
[ The Sparsholt Affair review: A blitz of gay longingOpens in new window ]
The mother-son relationship anchors the novel, in its depiction of two dignified and considerate characters who love each other deeply. Avril frequently covers up her own hurt at insults and slights from locals in order to protect her son from the realities of growing up in a racist society that is only at the beginning of a long, uncertain push towards equality. Dave is similarly mindful of his mother’s feelings, downplaying his interest in his father, or later, his loneliness as a bullied teenager on scholarship at private boarding school Bampton.
Sympathetic without ever being pathetic – he knows how to stand up for himself when he needs to – shrewd, kind and witty, Dave makes a great narrator, bringing us through his boarding school years, his time at Oxford, his sexual awakening as a gay man, his decision to become an actor, his first gigs on the road with an experimental theatre company, which eventually land him small, often subservient roles in mainstream theatre and television.
These shifts forward in time are managed gracefully, without hand holding, the reader expected to catch up themselves. Scenes are short and stylish, full of artful moments. Throughout, Hollinghurst suffuses the action with a marked sense of longing that tilts inevitably towards loss as the years pass.
Time moving on, the alpha story, the only story. It’s there in the title, which recurs as a motif along the way in various clever strains – the mother-son bond, the theatre world, as classical music or poetry – and is front and centre from the beginning of the story with such insightful lines as this in the prologue: “In your 50s and 60s your father-figures drop away – the ones who had licensed, enabled and witnessed your life – and no one can replace them.” In a book that examines big questions of race, class, sexuality and identity, time is the glue, and as in every narrative, the suspense.
The way Hollinghurst uses it to show the awful regression of Britain in the wake of Brexit doesn’t become fully apparent until the stunning end. No spoilers here but this does cause some structural issues along the way, particularly with the early chapters that set up a classmate of Dave’s, the moneyed Giles Hadlow and his family, as central characters, only for them to fade into the background for most of the book. But it is a small point in an otherwise profoundly moving novel, packed with feeling and insight.
Hollinghurst is the author of six previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize. Our Evenings will no doubt add to the accolades.
The double bind of Dave’s identity as a mixed-race gay man living in a society that seems to be circling back on its own intolerance is rendered in luminous detail. A childhood putting up with boys “pulling slit-eyed faces at me through the glass” and adults telling him to go back to where he belongs sadly doesn’t diminish as he grows up, but his quick mind and way with words is better-equipped to respond to the abuse: “‘Been in England long?’ said the driver. ‘Twenty-six years,’ I said.’”
By the end of the book, the reader will feel bereft of Dave’s company, like an old friend has moved on. With Our Evenings, Hollinghurst has captured the essence of a life, of all life, as a long day’s journey into night.
Sarah Gilmartin is a critic and author. Her latest book is Service