There is something deliciously uncinematic about Our Evenings, the seventh novel by Alan Hollinghurst. I find more and more that what turns me off a work of contemporary fiction is a sense that it is, if not written with half an eye on eventual adaptation, then at least informed by an admiration for the rapid-fire gratification and exposition better suited to the screen than the page. Here, Hollinghurst has a more than substantial plot – one that could be ripe for a BBC handover – yet so much of what makes this book magnificent would be impossible to convey through any other form. The events keep coming, but the quiet moments that receive such loving attention are the real treasure.
More crucially, Hollinghurst’s main character, Dave Win, is one of those you panic over in the final pages knowing you don’t have much time left together. Our Evenings begins with an adolescent Dave who must ingratiate himself with the Hadlows, the wealthy family who sponsor his tuition at a prestigious boarding school. The Hadlow son, Giles, is the capricious bully of Dave’s year. At 13, Dave is already quite fluent and accomplished at flattering and code-switching to appease the various demands and curiosities of his wealthy patrons, a knack we watch him employ in a different, sexualised manner in later life as an actor and member of an experimental theatre company. This territory is comfortable, vintage Hollinghurst, and one settles in with an idea of what will be enjoyed over the next 500 pages. But the real heart of the book lies not in class vagaries but in Dave’s mother, Avril.
Avril is a talented dressmaker who lives in a nearby village. She is English and conceived Dave in Burma. His father is unknown – lost or dead. She is industrious, habit-driven: we see her and her son taking routine walks when they live together, enjoying the intimacy of their contained domestic space. She is stoic by necessity, having had to withstand the frank curiosity or outright aggression aimed at her and her mixed-race child. But mercifully this is no two-dimensional characterisation of a hard done-by, self-sacrificial woman who must suppress her own inner life.
Hollinghurst pays Avril a touching respect in this portrait. She and Dave share a relationship which is in part predicated on the unsaid: references to Burma and Dave’s father, and Avril’s own reasons for going and leaving, are few. When they arrive, Dave must prod at them gently for fear of them evaporating entirely.
And yet their closeness is palpable and deeply moving, the small kindnesses of childhood on either side drawn out elegantly and at length. I noted how infrequently such care is taken to depict happy interactions between children and parents. Despite their apparent simplicity, their lack of friction (and therefore narrative propulsion), these are the exchanges that much of life is made up of.
This can be difficult to convey without sentimentality or a universalising blandness, but this is where Hollinghurst excels, remaining patiently and gladly in these moments as they unspool and the life around them becomes as real as our own. His handling of time, too, reveals the significance of the relationship. As Dave gets into the swing of his adult life as an actor and endures both his first thwarted heartbreak and first big love, Chris, Avril recedes. We only notice this gradual loss when a visit home to introduce Chris is a painful reminder, and Chris even thinks Dave embarrassed of her. The reader cringes at this allegation, knowing the force of their bond.
Some of the book’s funniest and most pleasurable moments come when the erudite, charming Dave allows himself a cattily polite barb, and one of the best of these comes in defence of his mother. A belligerent uncle who always resented Dave for his race calls the house in a fury to disinvite Avril to Christmas after she begins a relationship with a woman, Esme – a second insult to convention he cannot tolerate. Dave takes the phone call:
“She’s disgraced our name,” he said. “She’s disgraced it twice over.
I saw this was very personal, and perhaps I was a coward to be so ironical. “That’s once too often, isn’t it really,” I said.
His ensuing decades, which lead us all the way to the early days of the pandemic in unevenly weighted allotments of time – a few weeks here, a year there – are marked by a handful of truly great loves, and by his acting roles, occasionally on television and, formatively, as a member of an experimental theatre company. In Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Line of Beauty (2004), privileged white men are infatuated with black lovers. Here, in the framework of the ostensibly radical theatre world, Dave’s talented lover, Hector, a black man, is disrespected by oblivious and garrulous luvvies, and then by seaside town bigots. Hector is mistaken for an employee at a swanky party. Dave tries to empathise, feeling embarrassed by his proximity to privilege, and Hector reminds him: “Dave, you’re not even black.” Some tensions between the couple feel authentic, such as this indignity of having to compare oppressions, while others feel a little shoe-horned in or tautological.
In the world of arts and culture, Dave occasionally encounters Giles Hadlow, his old bully, who has now become a domineering Brexiteer politician. This counter-narrative is how Our Evenings is sold in its marketing copy, to the extent that I anticipated something along the lines of What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, in which disparate figures embodying different facets of British life interact and change one another. As it happens, Giles is a sporadic presence and both he as a character and the concluding plot pivot that tries to force Our Evenings into a more solidly state-of-the-nation type novel are ineffective and unnecessary. They feel like they belong to a different book, brought in to achieve a different task. Though a little deflating, this distraction can’t meaningfully diminish the scale of Hollinghurst’s achievement, which is all the more grand for living among those small recalled moments between lovers and friends, between mother and son.
Megan Nolan’s most recent novel “Ordinary Human Failings” is published by Vintage. Alan Hollinghurst will appear at Cambridge Literary Festival on 24 November
Our Evenings
Alan Hollinghurst
Picador, 496pp, £22
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[See also: Why painting (still) matters]
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