There’s an Alice Munro story, Train, which leaps through decades, as if the logic of time works quite differently in the world of her tale. Munro was a master of time, allowing us to linger on moments, objects and landscapes, and then to jump forward, asking the reader to fill in the blank spaces. Alan Hollinghurst does something like this in Our Evenings, a stately, elegiac novel that seems to turn upon a symbolic sundial in the garden of a characteristically Hollinghurstian country house. On the dial is a line from Cicero: “SESEM SINE SENSU” (without noticing, we grow old).
Our Evenings is the story of Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese actor born in the late 1940s. The novel unfolds across seven decades, moving from the 1960s to the pandemic, tracing the quiet, formative moments of Dave’s life with unhurried grace. There is an unmistakable sense that Hollinghurst, now 70 and in the foothills of old age himself, has mellowed, his once sharp prose softened into something more languid and reflective.
The book is divided into two sections. The first inhabits signal Hollinghurst territory: the private school and Oxford (“Oh God, bloody Oxford,” as one character puts it). Dave’s mixed heritage complicates his engagement with this world – he describes his existence as “a chaos of privilege and prejudice”. We meet him as he visits Woolpeck, the home of Mark Hadlow, endower of the scholarship that Dave has been awarded to the prestigious Bampton school. Dave is there with Giles, Mark’s son and a boorish lout who forces himself upon Dave. Later, Giles will become a Tory MP and Brexiter. The pace here is glacial, sustained by the characteristic elegance of Hollinghurst’s prose, the complexity of the portrait of Dave that we build up over each lingering vignette. It’s not coincidental that Dave is reading Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes early in the book. Our Evenings shares with it a preoccupation with viewing the past through a lens of longing, a kind of romantic retrospection that distorts and idealises the remembered moments, even as it acknowledges their loss.
Hollinghurst’s approach to time in this first part of the book seems almost experimental in its wish to impede the onward march, to hold on to these precious, youthful moments. New chapters and sections begin with very obvious markers of time, but they are not the passing years of a Munro story. Instead, we have “The next evening”, or “At half past nine”, or “When I came back into the sitting room five minutes later”. At all the breaks in the narrative when we expect the author to take us forward, Hollinghurst lingers.
The second part of the novel handles time quite differently, moving briskly from Dave’s early work in experimental theatre to a few minor TV successes, taking in three important relationships: Chris, Hector and Richard. At one point, we leap 15 years from the end of one chapter to the beginning of the next, with Dave attending a reunion at Bampton and meeting Giles, now “one of our leading Eurosceptics, and a prominent thinker on the right of the party”. This could have been a novel about Brexit, or about race, or about the traditional Hollinghurst concerns: sex, drugs and class. It is, in some ways, about all of these things, but in a different key. What is clear is that where the early years deserved cherishing, here we are hurrying wildly towards the catastrophic present.
The central relationship is not between Dave and one of his lovers, or between Dave and Giles, but, rather, between our narrator and his remarkable mother. Avril Win had gone to Burma after the war, had a brief affair with a Burmese man and came back to a small town in Berkshire to scrape a living as a seamstress. Her story – fighting against prejudice, building a life for her son, falling in love with an older woman – is almost as important as Dave’s own in shaping the narrative. Hollinghurst’s mother died aged 97 just before he began writing Our Evenings and the book is dedicated to her.
Our Evenings is a novel about acceptance: of time’s passage, of life’s limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful. Hollinghurst has aged alongside his characters, and his prose has aged with him. What emerges is a work of quiet power, a novel that finds its emotional weight not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow, steady accumulation of a life, with all its beauty and sadness, moments that slip away largely unnoticed, until we are left, like Dave, to reckon with the twilight of our own evenings, looking back on bright mornings.
• Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
