Our Evenings: A Novel

Our Evenings is a quintessential English novel and gay novel, with a feeling of the 20th century so thick it's impossible to not get lost in its nostalgia, philosophy, and longing. It has some of the richest, most exquisite language I have read of a contemporary writer and seems, wistfully, conscious of the loss of this style of writing in the modern age. This is a novel of inaction: our characters almost never take the action we desire of them on page, and instead, linger on the changes wrought to them through the slow and inevitable passage time. Don't let the Oxbridge homosexuality fool you—this is neither a love story nor (necessarily) an aesthetic affair—but an old man's novel of the journey of life itself.

A perfect contemporary counterpart for fans of Evelyn Waugh and Forster

Pretentious.

This is my sixth Hollinghurst novel (out of seven), and I'm delighted that this is up there with some of his strongest work, especially since it's been a wait - 7 years - since his last book.

As always to be expected in a Hollinghurst novel, his protagonist is a gay man navigating the trials of living life as a gay man in modern Britain, but the main character in this novel is decidedly more lower middle class than many of his previous protagonists, although a scholarship to a public boarding school and onward education at Oxford keeps him circling around the fringes of the upper class echelons which is usual Hollinghurst territory.

Our Evenings is expansive, both in terms of size (nearly 500 pages) and the breadth of the life period of the protagonist it covers, from the 1960s right up to the pandemic. New territory in this novel is Hollinghurst's extra 'outsider' dimension of the main character being mixed-race (half Burmese), encountering racism from his castings as an actor in plays to misplaced comments by friends and family, as well as in-your-face racism from strangers. Another interesting element is the development of his mother's sexuality. One senses from Hollinghurst a feeling that it was perhaps easier for lesbians to remain quietly 'non-outed' during the same period when two men living together would have raised questions.

A constant thread in this life story is the family who are the benefactors of the scholarship the protagonist wins to boarding school. The son - also at the same school - is a detestable bully who grows up to be an equally detestable senior Tory cabinet member, and Hollinghurst masterfully deals with him as a side character.

It's an enjoyable novel, thought-provoking and quite moving at times. Hollinghurst writes honest and complex characters, which is probably the draw for me to his novels, although somehow I never entirely emotionally commit to them. Aside from Hollinghurst carrying the flag for writing about homosexual characters, I draw many parallels between his style of writing and Ian McEwan's. Both are masters of prose and born storytellers, but somehow, although I enjoy both their work, I never quite fall in love with it,

4 stars - a sweeping and engaging whole life novel.

A more detailed review to come. This stunningly beautiful and moving novel focuses on the life of a richly drawn lead, David. We move with David from boyhood in the 1960s through Covid lockdown, and the personal journey is compelling. David"s life though serves as a vehicle for exploring issues of class, race, sexual and romantic identification, and the ways in which beauty and intellect are ground down more and more under the bootheel of acquisitiveness and hatred.

Time for that (slightly) more detailed review!

I am not sure if a story can be called an epic while also being quiet and intimate, but to me at least this book was simultaneously epic in scope and intimate in its moments. (If I had to compare the style to any other writer I would point to Henry James, but more British.) We meet our hero, David, as a young scholarship student, dark-skinned and half-Burmese at a lily-white elite prep school. David's life becomes moderately entangled with that of Giles, a boy who bullies him and whose kind and unfailingly decent father is Dave's benefactor. Giles and his family continue to have an outsize impact on David's life for the roughly 50 years covered in the book, though Glies and David barely see one another one-on-one after leaving school. As in any life, there are people we brush up against who leave a lasting mark and others who are constants but who don't much change our trajectories. In this book we meet lots of people who fall into both of these camps, and in the places in between, and all of them are interesting and intricately drawn. The focus though never shifts from David, an actor and later a writer struggling in a world not built to embrace him as a person of color, a Gay man, or as an artist. I don't want to tell any of the story, letting it unfold in its time is one of the things that make this gorgeously crafted story a joy to read. I will mention that though this is very much about David, it is equally about England and the limitations placed on people, even the best and the brightest who have been given some but not all keys to the castle, as David certainly is. These limitations are many but primarily those based on race, class, gender, and sexual identity, all of which define Dave's life, and those of the people around him.

Coincidentally, my first read completed in 2024, The House of Doors, was about many of the same things as this novel, and both have turned out to be grand ways to start my reading year.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Vignettes from the privileged and fortunate life of a mixed-"race" (useless term, divisive and ill-defined, but lacking an appropriate alternative one here) queer man and his circle of friends of his youth as they move through the stages of life, change partners, grow, and grow old, in the UK of our recent past.

Details are as synopsized by the publisher above; my reading of it was undertaken because Author Hollinghurst has never failed to give me the very agreeable experience of following him through a logical and internally consistent plot led by the loveliest sentences creating relatable, heightened-into-beauty situations and images.

Job done again. I'm in the contented majority of readers who felt well-served by this outing (!) into Hollinghurst's familiar-but-better reality. I even had the thoroughly unpleasant duty of feeling the humanity of a political-right radical and Brexiteer.

Enjoyable, all of it, but not new or freshly imagined by the author of The Line of Beauty, hence that missing half-star.

Our Evenings spans over seventy years and is the first-person narrative - autobiography in fact - of Dave Win a gay Anglo-Burmese actor and scholarship boy from a working-class background. It tells you a lot about English society - about race and class and prejudice - but only in the way that your own experience tells you about society. All the larger points arise ineluctably from the events of a single life.

I can’t do justice to the depth and subtlety of this novel, its multi-layered themes and skilful blending of the personal and political, but I was deeply moved by it. Progressing at a leisurely pace, particularly in the long first section which deals with Dave’s time at boarding school and Oxford, it immerses you in his experience through a series of painterly tableaux which seem to suspend time.

A central theme is the lifelong loving bond between Dave and his single parent mother, Avril. On holiday in Devon the adolescent Dave is too infatuated with the hotel waiter Marco to notice that his mum has formed a relationship with her friend Esme. In a touching and nicely underplayed scene Dave finally comes out to Avril and she and Esme come out as a couple to him. And then there’s Giles, awful offspring of Dave’s leftist benefactors the Hadlows. Giles bullies Dave at school and grows up to be a prominent Conservative MP and Brexiteer. The blurb on the jacket rather suggests that the book is about the conflict between Dave and Giles. It really isn’t. In fact he’s absent for much of its length though he does have a habit of reappearing in Dave’s life at inopportune moments. Giles is the personification of an insular, brutish, and philistine attitude that is the opposite of Dave’s own.

Dave’s memoir, like life itself, is about many things: intimacy between lovers, and mothers and sons, absent fathers and father figures, quietly unorthodox lives in quotidian places, and fleeting moments which reverberate in memory down the decades. Hollinghurst writes delectable prose; elegant and elegiac, poetical without ever descending into prose poetry. Lyrical but tightly controlled prose which radiates with intelligence and sensitivity. He can convey a complexity of emotion and thought in a single sentence; a world in a grain of sand. The unique power and distinction of this novel lies less in its epic sweep - a film can do that - as in the precise rendering of micro-moments of tenderness or aggression. There are certain things that can only be done on the page with words, words, words. Our Evenings does them with subtle brilliance.

A new Hollinghurst is always something to look forward to — he hasn’t exactly been cranking them out. This is his seventh novel since he started with The swimming-pool library in 1988, and it’s been seven years since The Sparsholt affair.

Our evenings takes us back to something like the structure of The line of beauty, with an outsider granted a glimpse into the world of English privilege over the shoulders of a grand family who take him in. We follow the career of gay, mixed-race actor David Win from his teens in the early 1960s through to Covid and Brexit. In the background we follow his friendship with the wealthy Mark and Cara Hadlow, who have endowed the scholarship that allows David to progress from a modest Home Counties background via public school and Oxford into the world of seventies avant-garde theatre. And we see the parallel advance of the Hadlows’ dreadful son Giles, who emerges (to the horror of his sophisticated parents) as a high-profile figure on the philistine, eurosceptic Tory right.

As you would expect, there’s a lot of beautiful detail along the way, revealing all kinds of fascinatingly complicated nuances in the development of English society over the last sixty years, including a delightfully unexpected dive into the genteel lesbian underground of sixties small-town Buckinghamshire. Of course there’s also a lot of very interesting stuff about acting and the theatre. Besides the inevitable Shakespeare we also get into modern playwrights, real and invented, and of course Racine, whose plays Hollinghurst has translated.

A true delight, even if it does turn out to be another book about the nastiness of now.

Sensim Sine Sensu
Oh, well it’s Cicero, isn’t it…De Senectute. I suppose, sort of… “slowly, without sensing it, we grow old.” from Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Our Evenings was a lovely read that reminded me of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh with its bittersweet nostalgia of remembering one’s youth and those one loved, and the importance of place in one’s emotional life.

The novel begins with the death of the man who changed David Win’s life. Mark Hadlow had inherited wealth and set up a scholarship to a private school which was awarded to David, a biracial son to unmarried mother who ran a dressmaking business. David never knew much about his Burmese father.

Fourteen-year-old David vacationed with the Hadlow’s at their country house. Giles Hadlow, the son, was a bully. An aunt was an actress and noted David’s nascent acting talent.

A great deal of the novel follows David’s time at school, then moves on to his career and the men he fell in love with. His race and color limits the roles he can play, although he is described as a beautiful man. All through his life, people ask him ‘where are you from’ and are perplexed when with David’s answer, an undercurrent of racism ever present.

He used to call me a brown faced bastard…Which I am, strictly speaking. from Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

David suffered Giles’ mistreatment at school and while he spent summers with the Hadlows. Giles’ political career brings prominence as an anti-immigrant leader. “He was an absolute shit,” David says years later, “He was a cheat and a bully, and very good at being both.” Giles becomes Minister for the Arts solely based on his family’s support of the arts, so he is ironically present when, late in life, David was Speaker in Vaughan Williams’ “An Oxford Elegy”.

Society’s attitude toward homosexuality is also ever present. When a schoolboy, David reads a poll stating that 93% thought that homosexuality required medical or psychiatric treatment. Past middle age, he found a life partner and they married. David’s mother became involved with a divorcee’ as a business and life partner.

The book’s title came from a piece of music David’s teacher at school had played for him, Janacek’s “Our Evenings”. “Our evenings are rarely our own,” David says, referring to the life of an actor.

After his mother’s death, and then Mark Hadlow’s passing, David realizes the brevity of days ahead of him. He writes his memoir of his life, which is this novel.

The lyricism and emotional attachment to David enchanted me as I read the novel. And at the end, I felt profound loss. Loss of this character, but also from the awareness of the limited evenings personally left to me, how quickly life passes by, how the world alters around us, for the better and the worse. The sundial at the Hadlow’s summer house warned David when he was fourteen, but he did not understand the message until late in life.

Dear reader, perhaps this story can be a warning to us.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.