Patrick Cash
The Shadow at Evening
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Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, 2024, pp. 496, £22.00
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Book jackets arrive with such hyperbolic blurbs these days that even the most pedestrian debut seems to be sold as ‘dazzling’ or ‘iconic’ – yet for Picador to describe Alan Hollinghurst as ‘one of the finest writers of our age’ rings true. The author of canonical novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst demonstrates again in Our Evenings his deep and often playful understanding of the human psyche. The engaging narrative voice belongs to David Win, initially a scholarship student at prestigious English boarding school Bampton, in the 1960s. Over his ensuing lifetime we follow a changing country to the recent past of Brexit and Covid.
The fact that David is half-Burmese adds an unexpected optic to the lens, although he’s never known Burma, and his English mother, Avril, a small town dressmaker, maintains a delicate reticence on his heritage. Characters of colour have featured in Hollinghurst novels before – such as Will’s boyfriend, Arthur, in The Swimming-Pool Library, or Leo in The Line of Beauty – but this is the first time the perspective takes centre stage. Win’s ‘first-class education’ through public school and then Oxford makes for an intriguing clash between the narrator’s almost stereotypically English identity and the occasional xenophobic intrusions of wider society: ‘“Been in England long?” said the driver. “Twenty-six years,” I said. He seemed caught up then in some sour calculations.’
David’s privilege is in many ways a performance itself, humorously hinted at in his first forays into acting at Bampton, where he charms the other boys giving voice to P. G. Wodehouse characters. His scholarship is sponsored by the famously rich Hadlows and, after a brief prologue, we first meet him as a thirteen-year-old staying at the family’s farmhouse, the architecture and resonance of which imprint upon David’s memory for life. He’s enamoured with the charismatic father, Mark, strikes up a friendship with straight-talking mother Cara and is inspired by gallic actor grandmother Elise. The glamour, however, is overshadowed by the Hadlows’ son, Giles, also thirteen, who subjects David to schoolboy violence during the day, and makes more sinister trips into his bedroom at night.
Hollinghurst’s characteristic irony highlights the yawning gap between David and his benefactors: the Hadlows’ favourite board game is called, of all things, Plutocracy (‘all the borders of the countries were drawn in, though some were left unnamed; my eye slid quickly over the blank of Burma’). Later, when David meets the Hadlows again in London as a struggling actor, the gulf is more perceptibly wry: ‘Cara asked me to explain where it was – “Not too far from us, I’m sure” – that I lived.’
The much-lauded style of Hollinghurst’s prose is abundantly present, with an elegance in the sentences that never obscures the pull of the narrative.
Yet, in his quietly formidable mother, David’s background provides him with a strong emotional foundation. An unpleasant encounter on a countryside walk reveals a potentially long-standing pattern Avril Win has instigated to defend her biracial child: ‘my heart was thumping at the insult to both of us, and also at my pained attempt to feel the insult as Mum felt it, her own hurt quickly concealed to protect me’. The relationship between David and Avril is moving, but is not without external complications. When the Wins go on holiday to North Devon with one of Avril’s well-off clients, the gin-and-It loving Esme Croft, there is a subtle humour that plays out at teenage David’s expense.
That teenage viewpoint allows for David’s secretive awakening in Friscombe Sands, building upon erotic glimpses of older boys and strange overheard conversations earlier in the novel. It’s provoked first in the form of fair-haired youth Ollie, wearing ‘blue square-cut trunks that the sea had half succeeded in tugging off’, and more shockingly in the beach toilets:
…writing, scribbled, overlapping, in felt-tip or biro on dirty grey plaster where earlier writing must have been scrubbed off… Little pleasantries they seemed at first, Fun Times, mutual fun, and then under them and further up, over my head, amazing words that were lurking there swam forward, will suck off… BIG COCK, 10 inches… meet here… 16-years guy, well-endowed, always ready… suck-off, with a crude enormous picture – my mind wouldn’t take it all in, but my body did, with a suffocating heat as I finished peeing…
Sexuality is of course a mainstay of Hollinghurst novels – the blurb for The Swimming-Pool Library described it as ‘darkly’ erotic – and the first aches of adolescent desire are deftly handled in Our Evenings. There’s no crisis of heterosexual confusion for David, but the reader follows him, occasionally cringing, through his romantic disasters and successes, including erudite cocktease Nick, insatiably lascivious Chris and gloomily taciturn Hector. The ‘our evenings’ of the title, a motif teasingly invoked throughout the text, and most often formerly associated with David’s mother and tutor at Bampton, is only shared with a man later in David’s life. The sex is dialled down a notch from the explicitness of earlier novels, but the loaded phrases contain potency, and the awkwardness of coming out in middle age is perfectly captured:
I had every reason to be frank with him, but I felt I heard already the things he would say to Claire about me and the straight-faced innuendo he would traffic in tonight, and I said simply but conclusively, ‘No children, no.’
A small criticism that may be levelled at Hollinghurst is that almost all his novels feature Oxonian protagonists (George and Cecil in The Stranger’s Child are, charitably, Cambridge men), and thereby risk an element of the rarefied appeal. Indeed, how well a character has performed at Oxford may flag their deeper qualities: the fastidious Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty has earned a First, whereas The Swimming-Pool Library’s more pleasure seeking Will Beckwith landed a 2:1. David Win’s tumultuous finale at Oxford contains its own revelation as to his psyche. But the clear and unfiltered love for the university as a place of higher learning (beautiful lines from Arnold’s The Scholar-Gypsy are quoted) is tempered in Our Evenings with a reminder that the institution is also the alma mater of many dangerous politicians.
Giles Hadlow goes up to Oxford at the same time as David. After meticulously laying out David’s formative years in the first half of the book, the second half has a faster tempo, following David’s acting career and relationships. Giles’ parallel foray into the Conservative Party has a habit of intervening into his story, pertinently at events like the Bampton school reunion: ‘Giles, yes, speaking in a halting but businesslike tone, I supposed to a group of pupils – his talk was on “Making Our Own Way: Britain and the EU’’’. As the narrative enters the twenty-first century, Giles becomes more powerful, first both amusingly and terrifyingly as a Minister for the Arts, and his anti-Europe rhetoric gains momentum. Eventually, David filters out his words:
He had the microphone and we didn’t, he sensed the collective resistance and rode over it, but there was something wounded, and dangerous, in his smile as he was winding up. I blanked out what he said, tipped my head back and gazed at the great glass dome.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history – although in Hollinghurst’s hands makes for masterful fiction. A real test of a novel as grand as Our Evenings, covering so many complex and rich strands, is how engaging the central narrator is, and David Win, with his wit, perception and moments of vulnerability, is a welcome companion through England’s shifting recent history. The much-lauded style of Hollinghurst’s prose is abundantly present, with an elegance in the sentences that never obscures the pull of the narrative. Lest any reader of this review fear I’ve summarised the whole plot, the novel also contains its own sleight-of-hand twists so one can’t be quite sure where one is being led. Any novel about our evenings must, after all, contain its shadows.
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Patrick Cash holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Oxford and spent three months as writer-in-residence at Shakespeare & Company, Paris. He’s had two plays published by Bloomsbury and written for Vice, Dazed and Attitude. His writing has been selected for the BBC Drama Room and The London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme 22/23. He’s currently working on a short story collection, Nightlife.
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