Samantha Harvey’s Booker-win reinstates the importance of experimentation in fiction that defies conventional forms. The plotless narrative shouldered by imaginative thought and planetary concerns of six astronauts, makes Orbital a unique winner. But does this make plot-driven novels like The White Tiger, The Remains of the Day, or The Blind Assassin that have won the Booker in the past seem outdated? Alan Hollinghurst says no with his new novel Our Evenings.
Spanning over half a century, this novel follows a boy—David Win—a British-Burmese thespian. We are introduced to his first-person voice when he hears of his sponsor, the plutocrat Mark Hadlow’s death in contemporary Britain. David is alert and yet not surprised or immensely heartbroken.
He reaches for Mark’s wife immediately and they get to talking about Giles, Mark and Cara’s son, with whom David remembers spending a summer when he was thirteen. We follow David’s encounter with Giles and then a series of men who come to affect him both professionally and sexually.
This coming-of-age narrative of David explores his growing years as an outsider, the other from the 1960s in Britain. Wicked, humorous and poignant, Hollinghurst’s novel sweeps its readers in from the very first page.
Hollinghurst has championed the bildungsroman of gay characters from his debut novel The Swimming Pool Library back in 1988. From his first book to his seventh now, he has moved readers by his stellar plots and characters that become a part of the readers.
Be it the English teacher Edward Manners from The Folding Star and his tryst with men in a small town of Belgium, or Nick Guest from his Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty, who feels restricted in the house he’s moved into, Hollinghurst’s characters and stories make for a convincing read of the world on the margins.
He has the grit of Iris Murdoch, the depth of A.S. Byatt, the expansiveness of Leo Tolstoy, the melancholic angst of James Baldwin, and the seriousness of Thomas Mann. These factor into his novels, making him one of the leading writers to bring stories of gay men out of the niche ‘gay and lesbian literature’ shelves and into mainstream ‘fiction’.
David Win’s story follows a similar line like that of Hollinghurst’s previous characters and yet differs. It is a coming-of-age novel where we see David come out—both literally and metaphorically. From being a quiet, observant, racially and sexually ‘distinct’ entity among the heterosexual whites, to emerging as an actor who is somewhat recognised in Britain, David comes out of various closets throughout the story.
The author manages to reveal these through a variety of subplots and incidents that shape David for the readers. Hollinghurst’s patience and astute eye for the details is admirable. It is rare to see homosexual characters get treated with such intricate details in fiction where brevity trumps length.
David comes to life through his innocence, ignorance, a sharp intellect and a body of flaws. There are moments, like his desire for a waiter when he is out on a holiday with his family, that take the reader by surprise and make him memorable; or his nervousness around his partner modelling nude at an art school.
Readers getting carried away by the premise of David-Giles love-hate tensed relationship may be a little disappointed. Their tensed relationship fraught by class and racial divides but strung up with an obsessive sexual tension is what hooks the reader. But, Giles is more or less an absent figure in the story.
The story, however, is stunning in what it does with David’s mother and her so-called friend Esme. From the very first instance, it is clear that the two women are more than friends. Unfortunately, the author spends way too many pages in creating a suspense that isn’t one. At that we don’t get to see David’s mother beyond her silences and submissive discomforts.
Our Evenings is still a novel that reinstates the relevance storytelling with a plot. It defies trends by its magnetic prose style, its thoroughness, its obsession with a narrative that is sweeping, and yet in control. It is a story of a boy who needs to feel loved by a father, a mother and everyone who comes to define the idea of a family that has haunted him all his life because of his racial identity.