Justin's Updates

"Sitting yesterday evening waiting for a book festival interview with Alan Hollinghurst to begin, I found myself reflecting—rather too late—about the dangers of encountering a favourite writer in person in that way. What if I found Hollinghurst pompous or self-regarding or otherwise offputting? Would that alter my relationship with his novels?

Fortunately, I needn’t have worried. Hollinghurst was quite charming—and funnier than I’d expected—as well as strikingly insightful about his writing. I enjoyed the interview so much that I even found myself buying the debut novel of the—excellent—interviewer, James Cahill (Tiepolo Blue). The event also inspired me to get around to writing a review of Hollinghurst’s recent novel, Our Evenings, which came out last month, his first since the 2017 The Sparsholt Affair.

Our Evenings traces the life of a gay mixed-race actor, David Win, from his adolescence in the early 1960s until something close to the present day. David is half-Burmese, though brought up in England by his (unmarried) English mother and with no real contacts, other than at the level of imagination, with the land of his father’s birth. As Hollinghurst admitted, the choice on the part of a white writer to inhabit a mixed-race character’s consciousness—the novel is written in the first person—became more difficult as he worked on the novel because of growing sensitivities about cultural appropriation. I felt he handled both Dave’s feelings about his own background and others’ responses to him exceptionally well, as—more to the point—did my black British husband, who is less than ten years younger than the fictional David and so grew up across more or less the same arc of time.

Hollinghurst’s writing in this novel is up to his usual exquisite standard, and, as ever, there are scenes that take up a place in your memory as if you had seen them in a film, rather than reading them. The childhood and adolescent scenes are particularly haunting. I especially loved the early scenes set in a sprawling farmhouse at the foot of the Berkshire hills crossed by the Ridgeway path (by chance, we happened to have been there a few weeks before reading the novel and guessed we might have strayed into Hollinghurst country when we saw the name Sparsholt on a road sign).

Hollinghurst excels as a writer both at the sentence level, and also, it strikes me, at the episode level. Some beautifully wrought episodes such as a cricket match at the boarding school where Dave is a scholarship pupil, subtly revealing of the class stratification that structures his experience there, have the self-contained perfection of a good short story. Another outstanding feature of the book is its treatment of some of Dave’s key relationships, especially that with his courageous, reticent mother, for me perhaps, in a quiet way, the standout character of the book.

Where this novel has drawn some criticism (e.g. in a cutting TLS review) is for its overall structure. The first part, which takes us through to a crisis at the end of Dave’s undergraduate experience at Oxford towards the end of the sixties, is narrated far more densely than the second part, which spans fifty years, down to the Covid era. There are numerous sharp pivots from one episode to the next, when we learn that five or ten years have passed. I didn’t particularly mind that, and Hollinghurst, in yesterday’s interview, dismissed that differential pace rather breezily, saying that he felt it reflected the way memory worked as you got older. It’s probably better to know that in advance when you read the novel, though, so you’re prepared for the abrupt shift in pace.

A moment I liked at the very end of yesterday’s interview was when an audience member spoke about how well Hollinghurst evokes experiences of loss and pain in his novels and asked him whether he ever grieved for his characters. It clearly wasn’t an issue Hollinghurst had ever really thought about and he raised a laugh by gently reminding the questioner that these were only fictional characters. It wasn’t done in a humblebrag spirit, but I thought the episode was a tribute to the exceptionally immersive character of Hollinghurst’s fiction. Given how much some novelists struggle to bring their characters to life, having to remind your readers that the people you have created don’t deserve their sympathy because they don’t actually exist is a sure sign that you’re doing something right.
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