Alan Hollinghurst’s exquisitely fashioned seventh novel arrives in the form of the memoir of David Win, a gay, mixed-race, somewhat successful actor in British experimental theater. The novel opens with a prologue in which David acknowledges the death of Mark Hadlow, “an ethical businessman, a major philanthropist, married to one woman for seventy years.” Mark and his wife Cara changed David’s life by awarding him a scholarship to attend an elite English boarding school. Interested and caring but not close, they remain connected to David until their deaths.
So too, in a different way, does their son, Giles, who is David’s teenage tormentor when we encounter him in the novel’s first chapter. David has been invited on school break to the Hadlows’ farm to meet his benefactors. David does everything possible to avoid Giles, who as a boy and, later, as an adult, is filled with resentment, right-wing political ambitions, vanity and bluster. By the time of his father’s death, Giles is the leading government minister heading the Brexit effort to rid Britain of immigrants.
At its most graspable, Our Evenings is about the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one. Hollinghurst explores this divide through the consciousness of an extremely bright and observant brown-skinned English boy who is attracted to other boys, born to an unknown Burmese father and an English dressmaker from a middling town in the countryside.
Of greater interest is that which is harder to describe. Hollinghurst has an astonishing ability to convey the ineffable; seemingly minor exchanges among boys at school or classmates at Oxford, for example, burst with revelation. He unveils the subtle gestures of class distinction and cultural power as they modulate over the course of roughly 70 years. Hollinghurst is not half Burmese, but his artistry is such that we feel the same visceral shock as David himself when strangers other him. The novel also continues Hollinghurst’s profound examination of gay love amid homophobia. The author manages to do all this while keeping his story at human scale, without grandiosity or abstraction. In short, Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment.