A Chaos of Privilege and Prejudice

Charlie Tyson identifies a political turn in Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, “Our Evenings.”

By Charlie TysonOctober 10, 2024

• Fiction

• Politics

ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S NOVELS brim with moments of luxurious deceleration. In The Sparsholt Affair (2017), a boy, a future painter, drifts into what his industrialist father calls “go-slows” (a term for workers’ deliberate reduction of effort) while on walks with his parents, transfixed by some detail of the landscape. In The Line of Beauty (2004), a pianist launches into Beethoven’s Farewell Sonata, and as the floor trembles and the piano bucks against its locked wheels, the novel’s hero, Nick Guest, falls “forwards into another place, beautiful, speculative, even dangerous.” Looking at the “glossy double curve of the piano lid,” looking also at the sloping features of his lover in profile, the curve from temple to cheekbone to chin, Nick feels “unable to move.” When, in The Folding Star (1994), teacher Edward Manners stares, weak with longing, at his pupil’s blond head, time grows distended; during the hour that follows, he sees the adolescent’s “tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold” and takes in “the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were of forward slither and lustrous collapse.” The hissing slurp of s’s and l’s announces: slow, slow.

Hollinghurst’s new novel Our Evenings is his longest and most stately production yet, the measured, deliberate work of an experienced artist who refuses to be rushed. Vaulty and voluminous, Our Evenings is dense with images, detail, and luscious description. It is also, by far, the Booker Prize–winning writer’s most political novel, one that sounds a cry of pain against an England descending into bleak, stiff-jawed chauvinism. Centrally concerned with the marginalization of art and the disempowerment of the artist, the novel builds from aesthetic dissatisfaction to a wide-ranging indictment of an unhealthy political culture.

In Our Evenings, the extent to which beauty can serve as a brake in a world spinning out of control receives sustained questioning; the impotence of art in the face of political brutality is explored with a ragged desperation absent from Hollinghurst’s prior works. At the same time, this novel considers how art keeps alive political possibilities that a particular era may fail to realize—or crush underfoot.

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Our Evenings follows the diverging fortunes of two men across nearly six decades of English history, beginning in the 1960s. Dave Win is half Burmese, the son of a provincial English dressmaker and an unknown Burmese father, who turns his youthful gift for mimicry into a career as a versatile and intelligent actor. Giles Hadlow, born into staggering wealth, is, when we meet him, “an adolescent sadist, a spoilt hand-biting brat.” As he rises through the ranks of the British Right to become a preeminent Brexiteer, these malicious qualities serve him well.

Hollinghurst’s prior novels have dealt closely with painting, music, poetry, and architecture. Here, for the first time, he foregrounds theater. The Western theatrical tradition began in ancient Greece as part of a civic festival; ever since, theater has struck many observers as a distinctly political art form because of its requirement for public assembly. Playhouses have long been frequent sites of protests and riots, and they are typically among the first institutions targeted by insecure regimes. And as a new social world is created onstage, theater is structurally equipped to reveal how our offstage social practices and roles are themselves “theatrical”—made-up, and therefore subject to revision. Everyone knows that politics is “theatrical.” This is not simply because politicians lie or dissemble (although they do), or because media organizations treat politics as a spectacle (although they do), but because the structural affinities between politics and drama are impossible to disentangle.

As a performer, Dave seems equally at home in comedy and tragedy. And the novel that houses him? While sentence after sentence glints with wry humor and ironic observation, its overall structure is tragic, and the ripped-from-the-headlines coda is likely to be controversial.

The painful finale is foreshadowed early on, in an after-breakfast rehearsal of Agamemnon, and again in a beguiling print brought back from Burma by Dave’s mother entitled “A Tragic Gesture,” depicting a dancer with arm outstretched. Our Evenings lacks the smooth linear plot of classical tragedy. A metafictional observation in the novel’s final pages comments on the text’s formlessness, its lack of “shape.” After all, life rarely has a clear narrative form, and the quintessentially realist task Our Evenings sets itself is to evoke the shape of one artist’s life, recalled through memory in intimate first person, with warm attention to the ordinary and the habitual (“our evenings”). “I remember places, and experiences, very clearly,” Dave reflects, “but they’re stills, you know, rather than clips. Or GIFs perhaps, sometimes—a head turns, a hand comes down, but you never see what comes next.” The story’s connective tissue is Dave’s sequence of male loves.

This narrative design marks a departure from Hollinghurst’s previous work. Hollinghurst has likened his first four novels—from The Swimming-Pool Library, in 1988, through The Line of Beauty 16 years later—to the four movements of a symphony, The Folding Star a melancholy adagio, The Spell (1998) a frothy scherzo. These novels are at once erudite and shockingly erotic. Hollinghurst’s frank renderings of gay sex in lush poetic prose made him famous. His brand of homoerotic aestheticism—in which learned analyses of Mahler mingle with athletic descriptions of hard jutting cocks—remains distinctive on the literary scene.

With The Stranger’s Child, in 2011, his style changed. The sexuality grew more muted and a concern with history—how we forget or distort the past­—more obsessively elaborated. The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair are historical novels of ambitious temporal sweep. Each revolves around an enigmatic, perhaps unknowable, male figure; each observes how the past shimmers, ghostly and luminous, through the present. Whereas the early novels typically concentrate on young aesthete-idlers lunging after sex and beauty, the historical novels are split into parts, with years or decades elapsing between each section, and a cast of characters that shifts as time passes. In some sense, Hollinghurst has always been a historical novelist. The Swimming-Pool Library looks back five years to gay London life before the AIDS epidemic, a gap small in years but large in significance, and The Line of Beauty takes in the calamitous conjunction of the AIDS crisis and the government of Margaret Thatcher. But his recent novels have favored the study of large processes of historical change over a steady focus on a single protagonist.

Our Evenings achieves a rapprochement between these two styles, keeping the concern with English history but mapping it onto one man’s life (whose lifespan overlaps considerably with the author’s). The bulk of the novel is given over to youth and early adulthood. But a proleptic opening, flashing forward to Dave’s final years, stresses that, while art may last, artists are mortal beings. For Dave the aging actor, his memory is not what it once was. Giles’s mother, a dedicated painter, holds up fingers twisted with arthritis. Wistful and elegiac, the novel announces a late period for Hollinghurst, a passage into the “evening” of life and a reckoning with what it all has meant.

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The story begins in earnest on a country estate in Berkshire Downs, an area of Southern England designated “An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.” There, the young, working-class Dave Win is a guest of the Hadlows. He has won a scholarship, endowed by the Hadlows, that will send him to a posh boys’ school and set him on a new class trajectory within British society. As with Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst offers, via Dave, an intimate view of England’s uppermost social stratum, filtered through the impressions of a guest or outsider. The uncertainty of Dave’s position occasionally aligns him with the servants: at dinner, he leaps up to carry plates to the table. Elsewhere, his status as a beneficiary is underscored. When they all sit down to play a board game of global capitalism called “Plutocracy,” Dave lives up to his last name, and the others push toward him “all their heaps of chips and money into one great jumbled wall.”

Mark and Cara Hadlow are “left-wing plutocrats,” patrons of the arts and education, as saintly as extreme wealth permits. Their son Giles is another matter. Giles hurts Dave. In daylight, playing games on the hill, Giles bends Dave’s fingers back, knocks him down, bloodies his sleeve. At night, he creeps into Dave’s bed, presses warm and hard against him, and climbs on top to force a slithering kiss.

Mark and Cara see Dave as a bright, appealing young man, a diligent student who will, perhaps, go on to win a scholarship to Oxford. It is Giles’s French grandmother who recognizes Dave’s latent vocation. A grand old actress in the Gallic style, she rehearses a pair of scenes with Dave (in both, he plays her servant). As Dave enters what he will later call “the other reality of acting,” he feels something inside him “fizz.”

Dave’s mother Avril is an artist too, but of a more modest kind. A dressmaker, she stitches and sews deep into the evenings she shares with Dave by the fire. Her hands are as expressive as any actor’s, “strong, broad-knuckled and nervously revealing.” Like Dave, she is often cast in the role of a servant, “on her knees […] with pins in her mouth.” Bountifully creative and quietly defiant, she works in bold colors, and over decades of steady labor brings into the world a profusion of “scarlet and mustard and purple.” When Avril embarks on a relationship with a wealthy divorcée, Esme Croft, Dave comes to know his mother in a new way. Yet there remains between them a certain distance, things unsaid—a subtle coloring of shame and hesitation. This is the most tender examination of the charged love between mother and son to appear in Hollinghurst’s work. (The novel is dedicated to his mother.)

Hollinghurst locates his hero’s sexual awakening not in Giles’s rough, unwelcome nocturnal fumblings but in a seaside vacation Dave takes with his mother and Esme. Dave nurses a crush on a man whom he comes to know, through hours of staring, in various guises,

as the loud doggy-paddler, sea sucking at his trunks when he emerged from the waves, and as the after-lunch sunbather, lips parted, blinded and aroused by dreams, and now as the slicked-back beauty out at night, drunk, jeering, leaning on the wall with his mates in his loose blue jeans and short-sleeved shirt open to the furry navel.

Pages of sun-drenched yearning come to a jolt in a public restroom by the beach, where, in a filthy bathroom stall, Dave sees messages scribbled on the wall and rising to the ceiling—invitations, solicitations, promises of big cocks and blow jobs.

Hollinghurst describes Dave’s response in a virtuosic sentence that curls down the page:

In the two minutes, three minutes that I stood there and worked on myself, then sat down on the damp seat to finish myself off, it was the words themselves that went through me, drove me on with their overlapping humourless intensity, and the twitch of light, shadow, light again nonplussed me till I saw the round hole where some former fitting had been torn out and sitting forward lowered my eye guiltily to the hole and found an unblinking blue eye six inches away on the other side.

As young Dave flees the scene, he hears “the hard click-click-click of a belt-buckle tapping the wall.”

Dave’s life winds on “in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.” At the boys’ school, he finds an audience for his chameleonic impersonations. His comic stylings wear a chink in the armor of “Fascist Harris,” the tyrannical house captain (British “public” schools not generally being known as training grounds for democracy). Through performance, Dave finds, an actor can wield a certain countervailing authority.

An actor’s power, however, is subtle, precarious, and tends to disclaim itself. Dave’s schoolmates like him best when he serves up impressions of P. G. Wodehouse’s sagacious butler Jeeves. In the years that follow, Dave is repeatedly cast as a servant. His breakout turn at Oxford is as the parasite-manservant Mosca in Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Not long after, he achieves negligible fame for playing a receptionist in a frivolous TV drama called Hibiscus Hotel. Art allows for, often exults in, the superiority of the servant over the master. Yet it is significant, as Dave observes, that the other men of color around him tend to be chauffeurs, waiters, or other anonymous service workers dispatched to cater to the affluent white circles through which he moves as a scholarship boy and a friend of Mark and Cara Hadlow.

Though Dave delivers soliloquies from Shakespeare with disarming fluency, “as if they were only accidentally in verse,” and has received the finest education that philanthropy can buy, he is rarely taken as a true Englishman. Nor does he fully enter the rarefied milieu that the Hadlows’ money opens for him. He does not complete his history degree at Oxford, darting out of his final exam on the British Empire. (“I wanted to do things on my terms and not theirs,” Dave informs his tutor.)

Dave’s old schoolmates see theater as a sideline from the real world of money, politics, and power. They regard him as a “foolish heretic […] though excused in part and made less threatening by costumes and greasepaint; to know an actor had a marginal glamour for such people, it was tradeable among stockbrokers and barristers, often flashy little actors themselves.” From the periphery, Dave secures some measure of recognition, even acclaim. The avant-garde theater company he works with is hailed as “among the best hopes for a new British theatre of the left.” Dave also meets men he can love, though not always in ways that satisfy him. (The novel’s portrait of erotic happiness found and grasped tightly late in life, long after one has given up on it, ranks among its warmest pages.) Yet all the while, he is shadowed by Giles, who—on a larger stage—is making his ascent.

The artist exercises a diffuse, delicate power, a beseechment addressed to the mind and senses. The politician is backed by money, law, and force. When boorish Giles, hailed “as one of [his] party’s leading intellectuals,” is made Minister for the Arts, the novel’s study of these two contrasting forms of power becomes stark. The “Right Honourable Giles Hadlow” takes a predictable line: austerity for all. “We’re tightening our belts in the Arts sector,” he informs an audience gathered at the British Museum. “But we’re committed to delivering a leaner, better future for our theatres and orchestras and arts organizations.” (Giles does not mention libraries, but austerity measures hurt readers and writers too; since 2010, 773 of England’s libraries have closed.)

Giles becomes a ubiquitous, “rather threatening” presence “in a world he had hitherto ignored, if not scorned.” Dave, now in his sixties, is asked to perform in an elegiac piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He is tasked with intoning lines from Matthew Arnold as the orchestra plays, “shimmering and surging around [him].” Unexpectedly, Giles arrives, by helicopter, for his old schoolmate’s performance. Dave is onstage declaiming his lines when he hears “a far high note […] out of tune with all the rest […] like a braking train, the long penetrating screech from the rails.” It is Giles, leaving in his government helicopter. As the “scream” of the chopper rises in the air with a “throbbing roar,” the conductor gives up and sets down his baton.

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Art is trashed, starved, infantilized, sidelined, drowned out, and degraded. Yet it is also, the novel suggests, our best hope. Hollinghurst several times underscores the cosmopolitanism of the arts. A play Dave is rehearsing on the eve of the Brexit vote has “a French star, a Danish designer,” and is itself translated from German. A British Museum exhibition of European goldsmiths plays host to “discussions in German, Catalan greetings, a gathering roar of polyglot talk.” At the same time, art enables an expression of national identity and character far more profound than Giles’s small-minded nationalism. Like all Hollinghurst’s novels, Our Evenings is filled with the names of many composers; but it is the quintessentially English Vaughan Williams who comes to the fore.

In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst flirts with an aesthetic critique of Toryism. “There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism,” Nick suggests to his lover. “That blue’s an impossible colour.” In Our Evenings, too, an immunity to aesthetic sensation is considered morally suspect. Mark reflects ruefully that his son Giles “has no sense of beauty”—a serious fault if you are in a Hollinghurst novel. But in this latest novel, the thrust of the author’s critique is less about taste or perception than about how art teaches us, how it provides a space where ideals that may lead to a more humane political future can be realized and preserved. At a literary festival with Giles, Dave feels “both frivolous and right.” Art may seem small, even powerless, but it lights a path for us to follow.

Hollinghurst’s novels have always celebrated the made and the fabricated, the genius that announces itself in the shape of a musical phrase, the twist of a cathedral’s turrets, the haunted face that stares from a painted canvas. In Our Evenings, there is something different, a new intensity of ecological attention. During the early farm sequence, Dave observes the “massive muscular yoke of [a penned bull’s] neck and shoulders” and hears hens “clucking fretful objections” as he walks past them. He nestles, as if hiding, in a yew hedge, tucked between the dirt and the lowermost branches. Multiple sequences of mowing summon the strength of English pastoral from Andrew Marvell forward, albeit with a certain decadent inversion. An image of conifers cut down into a huge springy pile, “rough foliage grey and green and blue at the tips,” becomes a somber still life, even an anatomy lesson: the “ruinous splitting crowns” of the trees “brown, brittle and dead, so that some fierce principle of upward growth and inward decay was laid out like a diagram, horizontal on the beautifully mown lawn.”

Can beauty guide us to political change? Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), written in the wake of the French Revolution, argues that it can. Schiller insists that political reform requires the training of sensibility. To arrive at political freedom, that “most perfect of all works of art,” humanity must pass through aesthetic education. Beauty harmonizes the sensual and the rational within us. And art keeps alive noble aspirations for human possibility: “Humanity has lost its dignity, but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone.” This famous vision of humanity transfigured by art acknowledges the great difficulties of remaking the society in which one lives. “The living clockwork of the State,” Schiller writes, “must be repaired while it is in motion. […] [I]t is a case of changing the wheels as they revolve.” Through play, he argues, humanity can prepare itself for a new society, such that we may “call Beauty our second creator.”

Midway through Our Evenings, during another scene of mowing, Hollinghurst develops an image that chimes with Schiller’s notion of political repair, the need to change the wheels as they revolve. Dave and his Oxford friends want to play croquet, but the lawn is ragged and unkempt. By the time Dave’s friend Walt heaves the lawnmower out from its shed, a game is in motion, the click of the mallets and balls just audible under the mower’s roar. Dave tugs up and replaces the hoops in turn as Walt pushes the mower through, “and we went on like that for fifteen minutes, mowing the lawn and playing on it at the same time.”

Mowing the lawn and playing on it at the same time: the co-presence of work and play, pleasure and repair. This modest image distills the union of aesthetic consciousness and political responsibility that Hollinghurst has achieved in this novel, which takes the measure of art’s marginality while finding in art the seeds of our collective future.