In what has become one of the defining rhythms of contemporary literature, Alan Hollinghurst’s novels appear at spacious intervals of six or seven years, each a solid architectural structure holding within it fugitive emotions and pungent atmospheres, each managing restraint and amplitude in tandem, each to be read slowly for its craftsmanship and with a greedy plunge of the spoon into the deft social comedy, counterpointed settings, and irresistibly expressive detail.
The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) is firmly established as a modern classic, though The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker prize 20 years ago, is probably his best-known novel: a Jamesian study of sex, class and power in Thatcher’s Britain. Since then, The Stranger’s Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) have brought some of Hollinghurst’s most remarkable writing. Investigations of legacy and memory, they are structurally fascinating in their use of discontinuous stories side-stepping across generations. But some coherence ebbed away in the gaps, and the daringly blank Sparsholt lead characters, for whom other characters felt so much, exerted on me a less certain pull.
Our Evenings leaves no such doubts. This is the story of Dave Win as he tells it himself, in late middle age, recreating with glowing intensity a sequence of formative or quietly significant episodes across six decades, from the 1960s to the pandemic. He is a boy at school, discovering the possibilities of music and drama, finding his own powers, shaken by encounters with prejudice and aggression, filled with unspoken ecstasies as his sensual attraction to men grows. He is a young actor with a subversive touring company in the 1970s; he is a lover, finding joy with his partners. He is an only son to a single mother, their closeness outlasting all change.
Dave is a gay man of a generation reaching maturity soon after decriminalisation, seizing his freedoms wholeheartedly amid intolerance. He is also half Burmese, though he never met the father from whom he inherited his Asian looks, and Burma is an unknown page of the atlas to someone whose familiar terrain sits under the “B” of Berkshire. The novel tracks the currents of gay liberation and race relations, not to mention a modern history of theatre and the arts, but with never a moment’s schematic overview: all is lived and felt idiosyncratically.
Going back, remembering his schooldays “in the far‑off middle of the previous century”, Dave begins among the wind and earthworks of the Berkshire Downs. It’s exhilarating up here, but he’s caught in joyless play with another boy, Giles, who says he owns it all and who’s currently administering a Chinese burn. Dave is 13, a new pupil at Bampton, on a visit to the family who have funded his scholarship. Already he needs to hold off the obtuse, entitled son who will go on being a bully, become a Tory MP and exert his power as minister for Brexit.
Growing older in parallel through the span of the novel, these two contemporaries converge intermittently, their encounters too incidental for any politician’s memoir but charged by Hollinghurst with tragicomic political force. “Tone deaf and proud of it”, Giles attends a concert at Aldeburgh, though his schedule as arts minister won’t stretch to his hearing the whole performance. Dave is on stage as the reciter in Vaughan Williams’s Oxford Elegy, “a strange late piece” for speaker and chorus, when the noise of Giles’s departing helicopter screeches through the hall. Fighting back, filling his voice with colour as he raises the volume, Dave throws his words “like a javelin” to the back of the room.
Yet Dave retains a lifelong respect for Giles’s parents, his sponsors, who are lovers of the arts, people with money “who do nothing but good with it”. Their house, Woolpeck, is a place of beauty, encouragement and refuge, one that Dave revisits in memory on “little mental occasions” that no one else could guess. Going on like frame narratives around the edge, these long enmities and attachments are touchstones, as the decades pass: measures of how imaginative life might be fostered and how it might be squashed under the heel.
Moving spaciously within this frame, Hollinghurst unfolds a sequence of superbly realised scenes. A summer holiday on the Devon coast gleams with the beginnings of erotic excitement as the 14-year-old watches, mesmerised, “the shifting parade of known and unknown men”. It’s bravura writing, quietly done, generously varied in tone as the Fawlty Towers comedy of hotel routine accompanies the beautiful seriousness of desire. It’s collegially reminiscent of other literary comings-of-age and seaside longings, but compellingly fresh page by page; no Proust or Mann or Alain-Fournier would have sent Dave off to the gents behind the esplanade.
Time, passing as the sundial says, brings Oxford gardens at sunset, theatrical triumphs, the “brisker tempo” of twentysomething life in London, bright with sex and energy, a potently drawn relationship with Hector, the Black actor who leaves Dave behind, their unlived future together “missed, incalculably”.
At the tender core of this novel lies Dave’s portrait of his mother Avril, a dressmaker, a white woman bringing up a mixed-race boy alone in the market town of Foxleigh. Our Evenings becomes a tribute to her: an intensely private figure, acute in perception, loving her son with a mighty steadiness, and finding her life partner in well‑off, self-possessed local client Esme Croft.
We see what young Dave sees of the way these women establish a home together, neither advertising nor concealing their love, forming a family unit with utmost care, though one so radical that it cannot be named. We glimpse, too, what the older Dave wants to understand and to honour: Avril on her own terms, “tough, unconventional”, creative and courageous. Dave acknowledges forebears of many kinds, from the writers he learns by heart to the old thespian whose secluded baroque acres have hosted “liberties … excitements”. Yet his most enabling and affecting inheritance is here in Foxleigh, in the conifer-shaded garden where, on the evening of his coming out to them and innumerable evenings after, Avril and Esme expressed their loving support with a modest chink of glasses.
Our Evenings forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole. If it’s a long solo, it is a various and populated one. Happily echoing with voices, it stays clear of pastiche. Its chapters feel inhabitable: places to which you might return for sustenance on “little mental occasions” as yet unknown. Hollinghurst is precise about sentiment in ways that put loose sentimentality to shame. And he is above all an appreciator, taking pleasure in the inexhaustible particularity of what people do and make and see. That capacity for appreciation acquires new emotional and political meaning here, in the finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.
• Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
