Few contemporary novelists are such beautiful prose stylists as Alan Hollinghurst. Fewer still have produced a body of work so unfailingly pleasurable to read. To make these claims is to parrot many of my peers, yet because of the rarity of these achievements among his, I’d say they’re worth reiterating. Our Evenings, Hollinghurst’s latest novel, is no exception. Indeed, its elegant, elegiac grandeur makes it his strongest and most accomplished work since The Line of Beauty, which justly won the Booker Prize exactly two decades ago.
This, his seventh novel, takes the shape of the memoirs of its narrator, one David (“Dave”) Win, a (fictional) Anglo-Burmese actor; conceived in Rangoon—where his white, English mother, Avril, was working as a “humble typist” for the British after the Second World War—but born in England. As Dave spends his life telling people—most of whom are suspicious of someone who’s “darkish-skinned and half-foreign” but speaks with the cut-glass tones of a 1940s matinee idol—it’s his unknown father who was “from” Burma; Dave himself hails from the significantly less exotic environs of rural Berkshire.
This rather mysterious single mother and her biracial son are an anomalous duo in the provincial setting of the small town of Foxleigh, where Avril runs a dressmaker’s business. Hollinghurst introduces us to our narrator at the end of his first year at Bampton, the local minor public school—with its “day-and-night sneers and jokes and random violence”—to which Dave wins a scholarship. His scholastic fairy godparents are Mark and Cara Hadlow, wealthy philanthropists and patrons of the arts, whose own son, Giles, is in the year above Dave: a nasty brute whom we witness grow from “adolescent sadist, a spoilt hand-biting brat” into an oily Eurosceptic MP who eventually spearheads Brexit.
One senses that Hollinghurst would never do anything quite so crass as write an “issues” novel. This doesn’t mean that his work is apolitical; just that character and story come first. Dave’s life emerges episodically, its expansions and contractions entirely dependent on the caprices of memory, a complementary portrait of modern Britain emerging as backdrop to these scenes. Racist micro-aggressions are part of the warp and weft of his experience. From Giles’s taunts of “dirty mongrel” during their school days; through the woman who won’t reciprocate his and his mother’s friendly smiles when they pass each other on a country ramble; to the many roles his skin colour and distinctive features exclude him from during his long, and nevertheless relatively successful, career as an actor.
Hollinghurst’s work isn’t apolitical; it’s just that character and story come first
Initially, I wonder if our narrator is a master dissembler. He may not have officially trodden the boards until his time at Oxford, but he’s been playing various parts all his life: the polite, deferential English schoolboy “with a watchful desire to please”, who wears his teenage “anxiety dressed up as self-possession” and knows to warily conceal his burgeoning homosexual desire. But, over time, we come to understand something of Dave’s natural reserve, and how it might be traced back to that of his mother, a woman who conceals her innermost truths behind a drawbridge of “fierce discretion”.
Front and centre in the novel is Avril’s own romantic life. Firstly, of course, there’s the presumed scandal surrounding Dave’s paternity and illegitimacy. Then the later relationship she embarks upon with the wealthy divorcée Esme Croft—who, over the course of Dave’s years at Bampton, unobtrusively mutates from his mother’s customer to business partner to lover—that’s significantly more visible. “She’s disgraced our name,” Dave’s bigot of an uncle spits down the phone after he learns about Avril and Esme’s entanglement, in one of the novel’s rare moments of unleashed hatred. “She’s disgraced it twice over.” Here, as elsewhere, Avril herself has nerves of steel—an important lesson that reticence shouldn’t be confused with shame.
One of the rare criticisms that has been issued against Hollinghurst over the years is that he doesn’t write women particularly well—in some cases, doesn’t write women at all. Well, Avril Win is an irrefutable riposte to any such complaint. Dave might be the focusing consciousness through whose experience the narrative unfolds, but the story is every bit as much Avril’s as it is his, Hollinghurst handling the unfurling of her and Esme’s long-lasting, happy companionship with tenderness and nuance.
Indeed, one of the most evocative episodes in the book involves the women’s sex life rather than Dave’s own. When he surreptitiously leaves his room to use the lavatory before he falls asleep (after a Christmas Day spent à trois in Esme’s large suburban house), the other end of the corridor is floodlit as Esme opens the door of her and Avril’s bedroom. She surges forth onto the landing, “her face, strongly flushed, a sheen of sweat on her breasts”, her untied dressing gown flowing behind her. Dave pictures his mother lying in a similarly dishevelled post-coital state inside the bedroom. There’s nothing explicit about the scene, but it is deeply erotic; the true nature of the women’s relationship witnessed and thus sanctified in some way, even if no official coming-out ever takes place.
Sex is something that happens behind closed doors—and between lines on the page
Throughout the novel, sex is something that happens behind closed doors—and between lines on the page. Yet, in the same way that the more showy, explicit eroticism of Hollinghurst’s early novels always felt integral, this coyness suits this latest work. The novel is instead infused with love in its many guises, starting with that between mother and son, the former emitting what the latter experiences as “a force-field… a strong mutation of maternal power”, and his sympathy for her in turn. We feel it as deeply as Dave himself does when Avril, caught off guard, lets slip a “darling” or “love”—each one heavy with the “weight of proof”—for her partner. There’s something miraculous attached to this queer family nestled in this otherwise orthodox small Berkshire town—their existence unexpected, their happiness even more so. As there is to the sheer ordinariness of the comfort and joy Dave finds with the kind and loving man whom he eventually marries, their relationship offering something much more than the “precarious refuge” he met with in the briefer affairs of his youth.
One evening, back when Dave’s at school, he and his fellow upper-sixth-formers are encouraged to debate the bill then going through parliament for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Speaking about couplings between older men and younger boys that were commonplace in Ancient Greece, the teacher leading the discussion—a man who’s quite possibly gay himself—blithely uses the term “making love”. These words, Dave remembers, “floated in the lamplit room and made the grim ‘homosexual acts’ [the cold phrase then more usually heard] into something quite normal and beautiful.”
If he’d been told then of the love—“quite normal and beautiful”—that lay ahead of him, he surely wouldn’t have believed such bounty possible. In Our Evenings, the line of beauty is the exquisite and expansive trajectory of both Dave’s and Avril’s lives.
