In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the coming-of-age story of Hollinghurst’s gay, half-Burmese protagonist. Raised by his white, working-class single mother in an austere market town, Win lives out the arc of a queer British Bildungsroman. We follow him from rural obscurity to public school to Oxford to the London stage. We’re with him through love affairs, golden evenings, sweaty nights, and country weekends. But here, as in The Swimming-Pool Library, a sharper reality scatters fragments of darkness in the soaring prose, like a deliberate flaw in the design. As the tragic, beautiful, brilliant Win soars and crashes through rapturous sentences, something not too far off in the distance is going horribly wrong. Worse, it’s getting closer by the day.
Hollinghurst is rare among his age cohort of literary English novelists: he hasn’t grown reactionary, anti-Islamist, transphobic, enraged at wokeness, or poisoned with privilege. Where several of his fellow baby boomers at the height of the literary profession have broken against the paradoxes of modern life, Hollinghurst dances through them. Patient and generous, his rage and ego sublimated, he writes like no one writes anymore, like no one feels the need to write anymore. Hollinghurst gives us a gift we didn’t realize we needed, so inured are we to half-baked prose and cranky narratives set in a perpetual 1992. Somehow, he avoided the Islamophobia of the late Martin Amis, the transphobia of Ian McEwan, and the political paranoia of Howard Jacobson. Though two decades older than Zadie Smith, his prose shimmers with a more honest politics and a more radical presentation of power dynamics through intimate relationships.
Our Evenings captures the foreboding of our political era: an abiding dread that worms its way into our quietest moments, our long nights of the soul punctuated with apocalyptic frisson. Hollinghurst mirrors the contemporary experience of waiting for the gradual pull of history to take us down with it. Structuring the narrative in Our Evenings is the relationship David Win has with Tory politician and former schoolmate, Giles Hadlow. Early on, we learn that Giles’ wealthy father, Mark Hadlow, is David’s patron. Mark awards him a scholarship to Bampton, a prestigious public school, where Giles is also a student. We meet David as he is visiting the Hadlow family estate and treated with warmth and patronizing kindness by most of the family. Behind closed doors, however, he is bullied and, it’s implied, sexually assaulted by Giles. While Mark Hadlow is a generous liberal philanthropist and patron of the arts, his son grows up to become a famously racist Tory politician whose anti-immigrant stance brings him wealth, fame, and enormous power.
Giles’ reappearances in the novel summon back into the past the black horizon of the present. The lifelong bully takes increasingly powerful swipes at Win from childhood through to early old age, gaining in strength and viciousness as they both age. But apart from Giles’ devastating swan dives, Win’s life is like an off-kilter retelling of well-trodden literary territory. In the best possible way, the novel feels set in a queer, British, coming-of-age multiverse. As in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, our narrator is taken up and showered in largesse by a privileged and powerful family. Like Hartley’s Leo Colston and Waugh’s Charles Ryder, Dave grows up and is ejected by the privileged set, forced to live out the rest of his life transformed and traumatized. The connection to The Go-Between is especially palpable in the early scenes in Woolpeck, the Hadlow country estate. Here we are introduced to Win’s hypersensitivity and instinct for transforming into whoever he needs to become to suit his situation. Win’s embodied quality in these scenes, his porousness, his Joycean transmogrification of input and output, reads like an explicit reaching out to Hartley’s Leo Colston. Also, like Hartley, Hollinghurst captures how being a child in another family’s home for an extended period can feel like visiting another planet. But where Leo’s otherness is presented explicitly as class-based and only implicitly as stemming from his homosexuality, for Win it is reversed. Non-white and explicitly homosexual, Win cannot blend in. His various costumes only emphasize his otherness. Instead, his talent for mimicry allows him to hide in plain sight among the British upper classes, his talent met with varying success depending on the audience.
In the novel’s opening scene, Giles takes Dave on a tour of Woolpeck’s grounds, showing him a viewpoint known as “The Rings” where it’s possible to see for 50 miles around. “‘On a clear day,’ said Giles, ‘you can see five counties, though I don’t expect you to know what they are.’” Giles proceeds to list the counties, but Dave interrupts and finishes the list. Dave knows the area, as he has lived there all his life. Aside from a photograph of his father and a few items of Burmese traditional dress in his mother’s possession, Dave has little connection to his father’s country. Instead, he receives a public school and Oxford education, develops a love for English poetry and Elizabethan theatre, and plays at performing Jeeves and Wooster for his schoolmates. Dave is comically and self-consciously English, and everything in his life points toward this impeccable Englishness. Having defined for Dave his own home, Giles surprise-attacks him, throwing him to the ground. “‘Got you, you dirty mongrel,’ he said. ‘Got you! Bloody half-nelson!’” Win, it turns out, is too good at being English, better than the wealthy, powerful, white Giles who goes on to devote his life to destroying the possibility of people like Win even existing.
While still on his visit to the Hadlows, Dave is taken by Giles’ great uncle George to visit another dangerous member of the family. This turns out to be an enormous bull named Ernest, who appears like “a coal-heap covered in brown tarpaulin,” his eyes fixed “on some larger scheme of violence.” George treats the enormous, muscled bull like a pet, patting his rear and scratching him under the chin, assuring Dave of his safety because the bull has had his horns removed. As George peppers Dave with questions about his origins, Dave drinks in the hugeness of the animal.
I gazed in a kind of compound embarrassment at the unreachable subject of Burma and at Ernest’s under-parts, the large hanging triangle of flesh that carried and concealed his thing, and behind his thing, and hard to get my mind round, the vast shape, heavy as dumbbells, purple as liver, swinging and knocking against his knees as he moved.
Ernest is like a chimera of fascism and power with an implicit aura of sexual violence. The bull’s horns have been removed, but, like the ever-lurking Giles, he remains dangerous.
In a departure from Hartley’s Leo Colston or Waugh’s Charles Ryder, Win is a real outsider in maturity, a fact that his patrons pretend to ignore but that Dave cannot afford to. Despite his brilliance and impeccable ability to imitate, Win is still gay and still non-white, and he reaches his limit at meeting their expectations at Oxford when his loyalties to art, scholarship, and love tear him apart. Crashing and burning, he becomes stuck in a traumatizing moment, his life frozen in liminal space, his brilliant academic future dashed. But even after getting cast into society’s shadows, he develops a parallel existence in the demimonde. He uses his outsider status to carve out a life very different from the one his upper-class patrons had intended for him. He joins Terra, a theatre troupe that puts on experimental, sexually explicit productions of classic plays with non-white casts. He finds love. He acts in films and TV shows. The paranoid thrum of Giles’ footsteps hearkens after him always, but he finds a partial home in London’s gay and underground theatre worlds. Unlike Charles Ryder, who is never able to let go of the aristocratic Flyte family — who even takes up their Catholic religion after being spurned by them — Dave finds richness and fulfillment outside the Hadlows’ circle of privilege.
Buttressing Win, providing him with stability, acceptance, and emotional support, is his mother, Avril Win. Hollinghurst, in a bold feminist move, breathes real life into Avril. He more than implies that she has a rich and full life outside of being Dave’s mother. She is an enigmatic character, cast off by her family first for having a non-white baby out of wedlock and then for starting a lesbian relationship. Fiercely determined, layered, and introverted, with a magical talent for dressmaking and design, Hollinghurst shows us parts of her that do not inform us about her son. We get glimpses of her life with her partner, Esme, and the pair’s lesbian community. Through Avril, we get snapshots of queer life in provincial England at mid-century.
Dave and Avril meet each other as adults and equals from the beginning. They have a formal and sophisticated relationship, even while Dave is a child, and she rarely attempts to influence him. This unconventional mother-son dynamic, Avril’s quirky, formal, but painfully intense love of Dave, contrasts sharply with his relationship to the Hadlows. Wealthy, liberal patrons of the arts, responsible for his scholarship to a public school, Mark and Cara maintain a patronizing chumminess with Dave. They are closer to him than their own son, with whom they eventually have a falling out. The Hadlow parents, with all the best liberal intentions, are clueless to Win’s predicament. Fully aware that their son is a bully, they choose to ignore his treatment of Dave and maintain, seemingly for decades, that they are all the best of friends. The callow, one-sided nature of their relationship becomes painfully clear at Mark’s memorial near the end of the book. Dave is asked to give a reading but none of the eminences at the event even know who he is. He is like a 19th-century governess, allowed to sit at the table with the family but never permitted to forget his place as a servant.
Despite or perhaps because of the Hadlows’ patronage, Giles appears again and again in Dave’s life to menace and humiliate him. When both Dave and Giles are in late middle age, Giles becomes Minister for the Arts under a Tory prime minister. Though he is the son of famous arts patrons, Giles’ own father has said that he has no sense of beauty. Dave tells us, “He was there, in effect, to give the Arts a good kicking.” Dave is asked to perform a spoken word piece in a performance of Vaughan Williams’ An Oxford Elegy, and Giles, in his capacity as arts minister, is in the audience. Giles takes a helicopter to the music festival so he can catch the performance before a meeting abroad. “I thought it ominous that Giles, ‘tone-deaf’ and proud of it, should go to such expensive lengths to catch a concert — flattering, for a second, his not wanting to miss us, but sinister, above all.”
Giles leaves during Dave’s recitation and the noise from the helicopter taking off ruins the performance: “[A]s the scream rose up into the air with a throbbing roar that shook the roof of the building, hammered and faded and came back even louder as it passed overhead, and the conductor set down his baton and bowed in defeat to his players.” Most devastating of all, Giles’ act of extraordinary rudeness doesn’t even appear to have been intentional — it is just in his nature not to care. Afterward, Dave tells his partner, Richard, that he’s known Giles for 50 years and understands him so well that he could credibly write his eulogy. But as with Giles’ parents, the close observation only goes one way. If the roles were reversed, and Giles were speaking at Dave’s funeral, he says, “his ideas about my life, and actually my whole make-up would be laughably wrong.”
This is the last we see of Giles before the Brexit vote, which turns out to have devastating consequences for Win. Like a great 19th-century novelist, Hollinghurst turns a brutal newspaper headline into a Rembrandt painting at the novel’s end. It turns out that the mid-century liberalism of the Hadlows that had afforded Dave a small amount of privilege and respect among Britain’s upper classes won’t last a generation. Dave was able to carve out a life for himself in the narrow niche of the arts, but even this is begrudged by Giles and the cruel and powerful inheritors of empire. Mark and Cara’s callow liberal instincts don’t pass onto the next generation — it is Giles’ rapacious Thatcherite conservatism that wins the 20th century and is poised to sweep the 21st.
Over hundreds of pages, Hollinghurst’s sun-filled sentences create a shadow space and explore far darker political realities than many of his contemporaries have dared go near. Queerness, art, and love create a beautiful life for baby boomer Dave Win, but they cannot save him from political reality. Dave does not serve the empire as his patrons intended; he escapes into the shadow world and is never truly forgiven for it. Hollinghurst finally summons a dazzling city on a hill as a bleak horizon creeps in to cover up and destroy it.
Annie Levin is a New York City based arts reporter, essayist, and fiction writer. Her writing has appeared in Observer, Jacobin, and Current Affairs, among other publications. She writes on the arts, culture, labor, politics, and everything in between.
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