“Our Evenings” by Alan Hollinghurst

A really good ‘whole life novel’ such as those wonderful ones that William Boyd somehow manages to write on a regular basis is always a joy. They are hard for a writer to pull off because of the need to sustain interest through the long, usually quite stable, middle years of a character’s life once the insecurities, uncertainties and high-jinx of youth are over and less tends to happen outside the purview of a career. These novels work for me because of the way they combine reflection on the life course (and hence the human condition) with a portrayal of the social changes that a character lives through. They also tend to be long and meaty, and hence are books that engage artistically, emotionally and intellectually over a relatively prolonged period of reading.

The protagonist in this novel is a man whose life span mirrors that of its author. He is born in the 1950s and lives on to a date in the near past. Like it would seem so many characters in British whole life novels, David Win, is a bright and precocious kid who attends a public school, goes on to Oxford and then lives a life of ups and downs as he, his friends and family all age while the world moves on. This is all rather familiar, but what makes ‘Our Evenings’ a little different, as one would of course expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, is that David is gay (as indeed are most of the other characters including his mother), and the story thus explores the changing way that gay men have been perceived and accepted in UK society over the past seventy-five years, and how this has affected their lifestyles. He is a scholarship boy from a lower middle class background who via education mixes with wealthier folk. David is also half Burmese – although we, like him, never meet his father and only find out a little about him. It is very much a book about Britain.

All whole life novels tend to sag a bit at points – or at least they do for me – and authors inevitably have to skip ahead through time in order to finish their stories in less than five hundred pages, but it is always worth pushing on, not least to see how a first person narrative deals effectively with the death scene at the end.

Alan Hollinghurst is a supremely natural and talented writer of literary fiction. The pace is perfect here and the character development very well-balanced. It all worked very nicely for me.