Alan Hollinghurst, a Booker-prizewinning novelist, returns with a new, evocative yarn
Our Evenings. By Alan Hollinghurst. Random House; 496 pages; $30. Picador; £22
Alan Hollinghurst (pictured) has a knack for mining the micro-moment. His outsider heroes are attuned to slight shifts in atmosphere. The young, gay intellectual in “The Line of Beauty”, which won the Booker prize in 2004, observes how Margaret Thatcher smiles “with a certain animal quickness”. An ageing antiquarian in “The Stranger’s Child” (2011) notes the way an Oxford don speaks with “snobbish reserve she hadn’t wholly wanted to disown”.
Mr Hollinghurst has never wanted to write a “state-of-the-nation” novel. His interest, he has explained, is not in generalities but in the nuances of lives. Like Henry James and E.M. Forster, to whom he is often compared, Mr Hollinghurst is more a miniaturist than a muralist. But his seventh novel feels topical for the way it retraces some of the steps that led to Britain’s Brexit vote in 2016 and its aftermath.
“Our Evenings” is narrated by an outsider several times over. Brought up by a single mother near London, David Win knows his Burmese father only as the unsmiling, dark-skinned young man in a photograph. He earns a scholarship to study at Oxford. Although he is British, strangers often ask where he is from, and some tell him to go back there. Naturally, he is discreet about the fact that he fancies men.
The book opens with a 60-something David marvelling at how a brute from his school days, Giles Hadlow, has become a politician and architect of the campaign to leave the European Union. It then casts back to the 1960s, when David was first terrorised by Giles at school, and inches forward, tracing David’s sexual awakening and stuttering rise as an actor. Although the drama is concerned mostly with David’s life, it all unfolds with an unnerving irony. The decades of changes that allow a brown, gay chap such as David to feel ever more at ease in his life are also fuelling a reactionary politics of resentment.
This novel should not work as well as it does. It unfurls slowly, with vivid scenes but not much plot. Mr Hollinghurst was not wrong to imagine life from a different racial perspective, but the unforgiving climate for such experiments may have nudged him to make David not just sympathetic and perceptive, but also less morally complex and intriguing than previous protagonists. Still, “Our Evenings” is a marvel. As David searches for clues as to who he was and how he came to be, this book becomes a meditation on the pressures of mortality and the mysteries of the self.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Brexit and its aftermath, revisited” (Nov 7th 2024)
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