ALAN HOLLINGHURST Our Evenings. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey

The Booker-winning author of The Line of Beauty delivers a novel about class, race – and Brexit.

In his latest novel, Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst continues his exploration of outsider as insider, although in this novel his protagonist, Dave, has to contend with both snobbery and racism. Dave is middle class, gay and half-Burmese, the latter becoming increasingly noticeable in a world that doesn’t hesitate to play political games with peoples’ race and domicile. Dave’s father also provides Avril Win, Dave’s mother, with a backstory of an adventurous youth, which, as Avril demonstrates, once lived, never goes astray. A single mother, Avril is a quiet, understated character, beautifully drawn and deserving the reader’s affection almost as much as Dave himself.

The novel is set in familiar Hollinghurst territory. As a teenager, Dave is awarded the Hadlow exhibition – a scholarship to study at the prestigious Bampton school – and is invited to spend the weekend with the Hadlows themselves. The Hadlows, and the idea of them, feature prominently in the novel. Mark and Cara Hadlow are comfortably off practitioners of all that is proper in upper-class English society, and the kind of parents who unknowingly create monsters. Their son Giles, Dave’s contemporary, is already an inveterate bully who will go into politics and practise the same skills on a broader canvas in less nuanced and more damaging ways.

Lydia, their daughter, a gift creation if Our Evenings had been written by Evelyn Waugh, is given little space but Hollinghurst tells us all we need to know about Lydia on page two:

Nobody has much on Lydia, except that she once appeared topless in a Warhol movie and died in a car-crash in France five years ago.

For Dave, everything he sees and feels that weekend is new, but he is never totally out of his depth and his small triumphs over the weekend make for enjoyable reading. For example, when the Hadlows sit him down to play the family’s favourite boardgame, Plutocracy, a game which rewards social Darwinism at its worst, using money and greed as prime motivators, it seems almost inevitable that Dave will be horribly taken advantage of. However, much to our glee, by taking ‘pointless chances, breaking unexplained rules and paying enormous forfeits’, Dave wins. Over that weekend Dave is the perfect guest, unfailingly polite, deferential just when he needs to be, but at the same time, like Hollinghurst himself, an astute observer of people.

‘Dave, very good to meet you,’ Mark Hadlow said, shaking hands and nodding slowly as he held my eye for a long five seconds, a warm and searching look. I felt he was entirely reassured by what he saw there, and also somehow shy of looking at the rest of me.

Our Evenings begins five decades later, near the end of the story, when Dave comes to talk with Cara Hadlow after the funeral of her husband. Here, among other topics, they refer to Brexit, and the role Giles Hadlow played in supporting it. Giles, the schoolboy bully who scrapes a second at Oxford, embodies Brexit and the kind of nationalism that will always ultimately work against people like Dave. As he did in The Line of Beauty, a commentary on Thatcherism, Hollinghurst from the very beginning of Our Evenings has firmly contextualised his novel within the intellectual and emotional forces that shaped Brexit. As is the case with Dave’s father, Giles makes few appearances, but when he does it’s difficult not to see him as either threatening or oppressive:

In a mini-reshuffle in the spring of 2012, Giles was made Minister for the Arts. He was so laughably unsuited to the role that his appointment was itself a grim warning.

Whilst Dave has happy long-term relationships with other men, his most endearing relationship is with his mother. After he starts work as an actor and moves into London, he sees less of Avril, but she is always a figure who, despite her quiet ways, dominates the book. Her own relationship with the wonderful Esme Croft is cleverly told. Avril protects and compensates for Dave’s fatherless state, and her empathetic understanding of her son is subtly and perceptively shown. Here, Dave, still a child, is discussing Esme Croft’s choice of furniture upholstery with his mother:

‘I can’t say I care for the material she’s chosen, but still.’

‘Which is it?’ I said. ‘Not Sunningdale?’

‘Worse,’ she said, tumbling the chips into the pan. ‘Ladies in Waiting.’

‘Oh, Mum …’ I said.

Esme Croft too is a wonderful character. As indicated by her choice of Ladies in Waiting upholstery, Esme Croft has an inspiring ability to rise above the snobbery and prejudices of society. She is the perfect antidote to the Hadlows. Like the Hadlows, she is independently wealthy, but where the Hadlows practise all the rudimentary trappings of the aspirational upper class, Esme refreshingly runs her own show. Similar to Esme and his mother, Dave, too, by becoming a relatively successful actor, is able to live in a world that both shapes and practises liberal values. It is only the constant presence of Giles Hadlow – who, as Dave acknowledges early in the book, ‘had been a swine all along’ – and all that he stands for that threatens to undermine that world.

Writing about an England that ultimately voted for Brexit provides Hollinghurst with an opportunity to give a dramatic and poignant commentary on what a society is prepared to do to address change. It is telling that even Giles’s own mother is dismayed by the son she produced. In some ways the end of the novel comes as a shock, but in hindsight, tragically, it’s one we should have expected all along.

Alan Hollinghurst Our Evenings Picador 2024 PB 448pp $34.99

Catherine Pardey has reviewed for Rochford Street Review and The Beast.

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Tags: Alan | Hollinghurst, Booker-winning authors, Brexit, British politics, English class system, English writers