In 1988, when Alan Hollinghurst published his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, it was original, striking and above all, beautifully written. It was recommended to me by my mother, whose innate prudishness was eclipsed, in this case, by her unerring instinct for brilliant prose.
“You have to get through all the …” she said, pushing the novel at me. She would have used some hilariously inappropriate description of gay sex. “It’s absolutely marvellous. If you can knuckle down, if you can grind your way through the …”
Later, she told the author himself, after meeting him at a party in London, that she hugely admired his book, “despite all the relentless …”
The novel was as brilliant as she’d promised, and so full of explicit sex that it and subsequent novels were only to be found, in New Zealand at least, in the “gay” section of bookshops. This taxonomy always seemed an unnecessary segregation; fortunately, times have changed.
Hollinghurst, who won the 2004 Man Booker prize for The Line of Beauty, is now positioned squarely as “literary and important”, and “gay fiction” has ceased to be somehow “difficult” or “other”.
Since the 80s, Hollinghurst has published a new work roughly every seven years. The daring wildness, the boldness and assertiveness that lit up the first novel have developed into steadiness and control. Now, the writing is quieter, but luminous with subtlety and humour. Sentence by sentence, he is a pleasure to read, no matter where he goes or what he attempts. You’re in the company of a stylist; the prose will be elevated by keen observation, accuracy, sensitivity. I can’t think of another novelist who can evoke so expertly the experience of an outsider making his way in an indifferent, occasionally brutal world.
Sentence by sentence, he is a pleasure to read, no matter where he goes or what he attempts.
The new novel, Our Evenings, is in the form of a memoir, spanning a whole life. David Win, the son of an Englishwoman and an absent Burmese father, grows up in the small town of Foxleigh. We follow him from his school days in the 60s through to Brexit and the 2020 Covid pandemic.
David is a scholarship pupil at a public school. He’s biracial and increasingly aware of being gay at a time when this renders him doubly alien. His personality is a type familiar in Hollinghurst’s fiction, perhaps most especially in The Line of Beauty’s Nick Guest.
There’s the sense of an open, sensitive soul whose courage, in the face of slights from the creeps and shits around him, is partly willed and partly naive.
David has grown up very much loved by his mother – Mrs Win, another courageous character – and he’s often slow to grasp and absorb an insult. He proceeds with a kind of sweet, oblivious optimism. His disingenuous politeness shines through, and he manages to show up, as if unconsciously, the prejudice he faces.
The scholarship is the making of him, and he deeply admires Mark Hadlow, the liberal philanthropist who has funded it. Yet he has to deal with bullying from Hadlow’s son Giles, a Tory philistine who will eventually become Minister of the Arts (he’s there to give the arts a kicking) and a campaigner for Brexit.
David encounters racism, homophobia, all the class-ridden nastiness of public school and beyond. His crushes and first loves must remain unspoken. Meanwhile, his mother is maintaining her own secret relationship with her charismatic business partner, Mrs Croft. David’s memoir of Mrs Win’s cautious, brave, steadfast presence is a warmly loving portrayal of a mother.
Hollinghurst is a master at conveying the pain of exclusion and insult, and the courage of those who faced it, and go on facing it, in multiple subtle ways.
During finals at Oxford, David has what he describes as a “meltdown”, one of those youthful swerves in life that can prove formative.
He goes on to be an actor, and here Hollinghurst evokes the very recent past, when it would be deemed “noticeable” that a cast member, at the Globe, say, was black. There would perhaps be murmured conversations among the audience about how well it “worked”, despite the “difference”. This does seem to be a thing of the past.
David and his fellow actors meet constant prejudice. His friend Hector, a brilliant black actor, is let go from the Royal Shakespeare Company when someone points out it’s weird having one black character in Elsinore.
Hollinghurst is a master at conveying the pain of exclusion and insult, and the courage of those who faced it, and go on facing it, in multiple subtle ways.
There’s a late, poignant reference to the new weather: “It was bleak, after a lifetime of fears defied, to face these further challenges, which after our death will be inescapable to others as death itself.”
All those fears defied, all the good striving and progress, yet nothing can save us from savage nature. There are no happy endings. But the novel pays tribute to the defiance and courage, in the most moving and satisfying way.
Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, $34.99), is out now.
