As usual, with Hollinghurst, I was puzzled at first. As usual, he dared to delay the design’s reveal till the very end. But even then, after I finished it and announced to myself, “It’s the story of why Brexit happened,” I immediately recoiled from the thought of AH doing anything so obvious.
Whether or not it’s “about” Brexit or Boris Johnson or the state of England in the 2020s, it definitely is a Alan Hollinghurst novel, i.e. a clever but naïve young man is thrilled and disoriented by his simultaneous discoveries of three worlds: wealth and privilege, art and ideas, sex and love with other men. Which open up, in turn, discoveries of other worlds, of other times, populated by other men with analogous stories.
And as usual with Hollinghurst, the telling is punctuated by significant silences and omissions of events other novelists would consider central. And characters failing to grasp the significance of what’s happening to them.
Only after finishing “Our evenings” did I realize that the first half was not a boring recycling of a tired theme (parvenu at public school then Oxford) but a brilliant achievement. David Win narrates his own story and AH lets David ramble on about his school days and his first crushes – the key things for David – as the context for a series of encounters with English racism and nativism that David finds disconcerting but doesn’t dwell on. For the reader, connecting the dots, these encounters add up to the book’s central thread.
Meanwhile, there's the exquisite torment of David's shock and humiliation as his beloved Nick brushes him off. To which is added a final twist of the knife - innocently, inadvertently, by David's own mother. Nobody does rejection like Hollinghust.
David’s school days also introduce him to Giles, who might be Boris Johnson. AH doesn’t do enough with Giles to make him David’s nemesis or enemy. We get a lot of him at the beginning, but then he disappears, doing a walk-on every few years. We only hear about him second-hand until Chapter 29 – the comic high point of the book – when his exit in a deafening helicopter wrecks the performance of one of Vaughan Williams’ heartfelt tributes to England - the stuff the Tories are allegedly defending from foreign invaders.
Giles is an update of Widmerpool, the comic/sinister political striver in Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the music of time”. Powell’s in-the-round portrait of Widmerpool is, it seems, what at least one reviewer of “Our evenings” wished AH had provided of Giles. But AH keeps too scrupulously to the conceit of the book being David’s words that he couldn’t violate David’s lack of interest in Giles. And that lack of interest, David’s complete indifference to everything outside of his theatrical/artistic/gay milieu is part of the larger story.
In contrast to the sinister Giles/Widmerpool/Boris theme, AH provides a contrasting, brighter thread. David observes his mother start up a relationship with another woman, helps them settle down together, and provides regular updates, over the decades, of their life together. They provide an image of stable, steady, contented queer lives in a mode different from his – but of course David barely realizes that until they’re gone. The scene of David studying his mother and Esme’s home after learning she had died is one of the moments when the AH lets his prose takes flight.
David narrating his own story presents an essentially untroubled rise and rise. His life story has the flatness of plausible success. He certainly was not born into privilege – English mother, Burmese father who’s more idea than reality - but he worked his way into it. He presents his life from inside a bubble of elite-educated bohemian artists. He really doesn’t have a clue about anything outside of that. And so, David and his world, observed Giles from a distance, ironically. For all their cleverness unable to foresee the damage he would do.
[Picture: Prunella Clough, “Wire tangle II”, 1978]
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