The latest novel from Booker Prize-winning author Alan Hollinghurst also deserves to win awards. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that anyone reading the intriguing prologue would not be hooked within the first five pages of this epic pseudo-autobiography.
It is an intimate portrait of an actor, Dave Win, stretching all the way from schooldays in the 1960s to the advent of the pandemic. Viewing the state of the nation through the eyes of a variegated assortment of middle- and upper-class folk leaves us in Anthony Powell or William Boyd country, although these days, that is also Alan Hollinghurst territory, particularly when the protagonist is gay.
Dave Win’s background means that, for better or worse, he was always going to stand out. In addition to his sexuality, while his single mother hailed from England, his father was Burmese. To compound the confusion, his mother takes up with another woman. Fortuitously, primarily due to his innate intelligence, Dave found himself under the philanthropic eye of benefactors and patrons Mark and Cara Hadlow—very rich and generous but also kindly.
During a weekend in their stately home, they effect a meeting and impromptu masterclass in Shakespeare and Racine with Mark’s Arkadina-like French mother, Elise Pleynet, who happily shares morsels of stage lore and wisdom. Thanks to the Hadlows, he was accommodated at a traditional, English public school and coincidentally garnered the opportunity to become acquainted (rather than friendly) with their son Giles, a more malign but less malicious version of Powell’s Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music of Time.
Indeed, although he disappears for long stretches of a book that runs almost 500 pages, Giles is almost as consequential a figure as he thinks himself, bolstered by impossibly inflated self-regard. In opposition to his liberal parents, his right-wing views become apparent from early days as a school bully, eventually turning Giles into an extreme pro-Brexit MP and Minister long before leaving Europe became fashionable.
By that point, the man once described as “an adolescent sadist, spoilt hand-biting brat, who could never, surely, be taken seriously by anyone” becomes an unlikely and undeserving Arts Minister, preparing to sharpen the axe of austerity on behalf of an uncaring government.
There is far more to Our Evenings than merely a convincing depiction of the coming-of-age a mindless minister and, incidentally, plagiarist (does that sound bring any real-life figure to mind?). The bulk of the novel convincingly follows the stuttering life and career of Dave Win, condemned to be a perennial outsider but making his way quite happily. Along that way, he has to face discrimination on racial and gender grounds to a degree that would be illegal today.
The first half of this long work largely comprises schooldays and a blossoming at Oxford, by which point it is clear that acting has primacy over studying and would become a lifelong passion. We are also able to follow not only a love life that is sometimes turbulent but also an acting career of the kind that was common for those took up the profession half a century ago.
Soon after leaving university, Dave was touring with an experimental repertory company, close to starving but getting constant, varied work. The middle of his career must have been reasonably successful but is largely skated over, some of the strongest sections focusing on later life as an opportunity to reflect on a modicum of achievement but also repeating grief bring Our Evenings to a satisfying closure.
Alan Hollinghurst is very good at getting beneath the skin of his characters, allowing readers to gain a deep understanding of motivations, while at the same time unknowingly portraying the ups and downs of our country over a half-century period stretching to the present day.