Our Evenings

Gabi's Review

Alan Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty. Four novels later comes his latest, Our Evenings, which in my view is as good if not better than the prize winner twenty years ago. Written in the form of a fictional memoir that spans seventy years in Britain, the novel is an intelligent examination of xenophobia, homophobia, class difference and the arts. Despite the overtly political nature of these issues, Hollinghurst refuses to push an agenda. Instead, he explores complex ideas by creating gorgeously drawn scenes of quintessential Englishness, with atmospheric and lush descriptions of tea rooms, seaside boarding houses, London theatre life and the glamorous lives lived on elite estates.

The novel’s main character, David Win, is the son of a single English mother, a secretary in the British consulate in Burma, and an absent Burmese father. David’s story takes place in the decades from 1962 to the present day. Eurasian, attractive and intellectually gifted, he is a scholarship student at Bampton, an elite boy’s college, and secures an exhibition via the generosity of wealthy patrons.

Although he is raised as the perfectly well-mannered and conformist English boy, he is also distinctly ‘other,’ struggling to deal with his isolating sense of difference at home and at school. David's childhood naivety contrasts wonderfully as he encounters the darker aspects of adult life. At school he is relentlessly harassed by Giles, his wealthy patron’s resentful and brutish son; when he spends the weekend at the family’s country house, he earnestly tries to be deserving of their gracious hospitality while keeping the bullying a secret. His flawless ability to do perfect impressions gains him credibility at school, and subsequently launches him into a successful acting career.

Hollinghurst’s skilfull use of flashbacks, having David revisit scenes and places from his youth enables readers to see how hard-won laws about racism and gay marriage have benefited his lived experience. At the same time, however, the novel shows the precariousness of such progress, most apparent in the establishment of Brexit for which Giles, now a politician, is an ardent advocate. The story is expertly conceived and constructed. It’s an understated and immersive picture of a single British life that also evokes the changing social context in detail and depth. David is a most memorable character; one of my favourites for the year.

Publisher's Review 

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience.

It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age. Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence. As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician. Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.