Our Evenings

Alan Hollinghurst

Picador, £22

Review by Rosemary Goring

From the opening page, there is the assurance of being in good hands with this novel, the ease of the first chapter allowing you to settle in and let the author transport you where he will. This Alan Hollinghurst does with exceptional elan, the fluency and understated confidence of his writing making his prose flow like music.

That seems apt, since the elegiac title of the Booker prize-winner’s seventh novel is taken from a gentle piano piece by Janáček. The novel, too, is gentle and quietly reflective, but beneath it run strong feelings, among them love, desire, anger, greed and prejudice. Especially prejudice.

As in earlier novels, such as The Swimming Pool Library and The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst’s tale encompasses past and present-day.

In this instance he harkens back to the 1950s boyhood of the narrator, David Winn, when he is raised by his English mother in a small market town, where she is a dressmaker. His Burmese father, of whom he knows hardly anything, is presumed long since dead and his mother’s references to him or her days in Burma are rare. When one Christmas, under the influence of sherry, she dons traditional Burmese costume, David has “a feeling that something too private for any of us really to understand was being said for the first time in public”.

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The sweep of recent English social and political history is Hollinghurst’s domain. In his depiction of David, who becomes a well-respected actor with experimental theatre companies, he reprises a running theme in his fiction, of how the world was for gay men in the decades before and after homosexual relationships became legal. In the shape of David’s obnoxious school mate Giles Hadlow, who becomes a government minister, he once again addresses the influence of the Conservative party in modern times, in this case Brexit, which he describes as “a devastation”.

David has been the beneficiary of a scholarship at a minor boarding school, endowed by Giles’s father Mark, allowing him an education his mother could never have afforded. “Dad, this squalid individual is Dave”, says Giles, when introducing him at the family country house. Ironically, it is the fair-minded and urbane Mark who becomes something of a father figure for him, a role model despite his wealth and privilege.

Years later, when his and Giles’s paths continue to cross – on this occasion at a book festival - David reflects that, for millions of people “Giles had the heft of a senior politician, a man who could be looked to to change things… maybe it was a limitation in me to see him only, or in essence, as an adolescent sadist, a spoilt hand-biting brat, who could never, surely, be taken seriously by anyone”. One wonders how many Tory MPs and Brexiteers were in his thoughts when he wrote that.

In one of several comic scenes, David’s appearance at the book festival is ambushed by the now prominent Tory MP, who is scheduled to speak (in a much bigger venue) at the same time. Learning that the actor went to school with the Minister for the Arts, his audience is far more interested in discovering what Giles was like as a boy than in David’s revelations about experimental theatre.

Taking a caustic swipe at the state of the British political classes, Hollinghurst writes that Giles was “so laughably unsuited to the role that his appointment was itself a grim warning.” When he is described as one of the party’s leading intellectuals, “I started my madman’s laugh, then… saw it was probably true”.

The novel takes a caustic swipe at the state of the British political classes - and its public school cultureThe novel takes a caustic swipe at the state of the British political classes - and its public school culture (Image: UIG via Getty Images) Giles is the lit fuse that runs beneath the narrative, his embrace of the anti-Europe, anti-immigrant feeling that resulted in the Leave vote a sinister undercurrent. And yet, despite the plot being shaped by political manoeuvring, the tone of Our Evenings is of thoughtful remembrance - and undisguised contempt - rather than tub-thumping.

Hollinghurst’s ability to evoke the past with a passing reference to an image or a line of conversation is almost Proustian. There are hints also of Henry James in his attention to seemingly trivial details, which build a scene as if in oils. As when, for instance, David knocks on a schoolmaster’s door: “you waited for his slow-voiced ‘Come in’, which conveyed both the depth of his concentration and a reasonable interest in why you were disturbing it”. In his portraits of the rich, and of schooldays and Oxford undergraduate life, there are echoes of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but despite these fleeting impressions, Hollinghurst’s style is inimitable.

Although David’s teenage years are vividly evoked, his torments at school are handled lightly, without wallowing. Bampton school was no Dotheboys Hall, but it was nevertheless a place of “day-and-night sneers and jokes and random violence”, in which David’s gift as a mimic was his ticket to acceptance.

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In the same understated way, his affection for his mother is authentically depicted, with moments that made him cringe, even while loving and admiring her. A chapter devoted to a seaside holiday with his mum and one of her clients, Esme, during which she removes her wedding ring, is a masterly depiction of sexual awakening and awareness, on behalf of others as well as himself. Smitten by the hotel’s Italian waiter, David recalls that when Marco left the dining room, he experienced “a neutral feeling, of interest removed, till the waft of the kitchen door and his tart little laugh brought him back in range.”

From adolescent stirrings through various relationships until eventually finding lasting love, Our Evenings charts the course of a talented, sensitive man of mixed race through life in step with that of his country. Throughout it, however, the colour of his skin sets him apart, as if to some he will always be an outsider.

“Our evenings” is the phrase David and his husband would ironically use in the early days of their relationship, when they could only snatch a few nights a week together. It is freighted with meaning, some of it wistful, regretful even, but much of it filled with joy – as is this hauntingly truthful novel.