Near the conclusion of Alan Hollinghurst’s languorous, elegant novel “Our Evenings,” the seventh from the Booker laureate, the elderly biracial narrator, Dave Win, a London actor famous for East Asian roles, bumps into Giles Hadlow, a Tory politician and dyed-in-the-wool nativist, at a literary festival held in a manor house. Both have just published books, but only one draws crowds. As a teenager Dave had benefited from the Hadlow Exhibition: a scholarship funded by Giles’s parents to attend Bampton, an eminent Berkshire public school (what we Yanks would call a prep school). Though Giles’s parents are Dave’s benefactors, Giles is not. Dave once spent a holiday at the Hadlow farm, where Giles, brawny and cruel, tormented him with slurs and half nelsons.
Now Giles is leading the charge for Brexit, braying, jowl-faced, about immigrants in the manner of Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. “I always had to remember that for others, millions of them, Giles had the heft of a senior politician, a man who could be looked to to change things, with all the glamour and gravity of government,” Dave notes. “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.”
Giles in his two guises — mean boy and dogmatic politician — bookends “Our Evenings,” although for most of the story he’s glimpsed in the distance, less a presence than Dave’s patrons, Mark and Cara Hadlow. Grounded in the bedrock of affluence but kindhearted, they nurture a connection long after Dave leaves Bampton. It’s Mark’s death that prompts Dave to peer back on his colorful life, with the support of his husband, Richard.
Structured like a memoir, “Our Evenings” is no page-turner; it moves with the heavy tread of a royal procession. It insists on patience as it doles out its pleasures. Yet Dave is a captivating protagonist, threading narrative lines as Hollinghurst skewers the hidden and not-so-hidden bigotries that define Britain.
Raised in working-class austerity, Dave, the dark-skinned child of an English mother (a dressmaker named Avril) and a Burmese father (who, as Dave’s mother explains, was killed in a coup before her son was born), dodges his neighbors’ baleful stares, armed with “a watchful desire to please.” The Wins’ fortunes shift when his mother’s client Esme Croft, a well-heeled divorcée, discreetly woos Avril and adopts them as her family. A vacation at the Devon shore clinches the union while Dave falls under the spell of a handsome waiter. His longings are so hushed they almost don’t seem like attractions. Dave’s a top-tier student but his real passion is the theater, which he later pursues at Oxford. Offstage Dave makes himself small, struggling with his sexuality, prone to doubt about status. He learns to perform to the expectations of others — acting as survival strategy.
“Our Evenings” is veddy English, brimming with teas in the garden, Vaughan Williams symphonies, even mentions of the iconic valet Jeeves. Hollinghurst writes with a painter’s eye, attuned to composition and palette, a nod to the British landscape tradition. (A minor character is named John Constable.) “It seemed like one long trundle of fields running all the way down to Oxford, two miles off. The heart of the city was probed and exposed by the sunset, fine-etched rooftops and spires, chapel windows blazing. In the sky to the east above Headington, over London soon, high elements of cloud, white Alps in the blue, took colour as we watched, burned with the fierce pink and orange and cavernous grey of a vast log fire, richer and richer.”
As the ’60s rebellions burn, Dave crashes in his final exams, a nightmare come to life, triggered by twin stressors: lack of preparation and an unrequited fixation on a hunky classmate. Denied a degree, he plunges into London’s experimental “thesp” scene, with occasional visits to his mother and Esme, their sitting room a safe harbor.
As in his earlier books, the author perfumes his tale with eroticism, an emphasis on same-sex seduction, yet his reach is broader here, surveying a constellation of male relationships. Lovers vanish; friendships wither on the vine; mentors rarely falter; husbands hang on during tough times. Always Dave, a modern Telemachus, searches for scraps of information about his absent father.
Hollinghurst wears his influences like a greatcoat: Jacobin dramatists, Henry James and E.M. Forster in particular. But the clothes suit him as he finds Dave’s voice — and the novel’s — amid the layers. With each decade Dave tightens his grip on us, linking the bloom of queer equality and social acceptance with the canker of xenophobia. The book’s final section feels both shocking and inevitable, as Hollinghurst homes in on the values sacrificed when grievances dictate why we give and withhold compassion
“Our Evenings” is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.
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