Anne O'Connell's Reviews > Our Evenings

Our Evenings is presented as the memoir of acclaimed actor Dave Win. When his benefactor the well-known philanthropist Mark Hadlow dies, Dave has occasion to contact his widow and look back on his own life. Alan Hollinghurst has again created characters I’m interested in, that I believe in, and a complete world within the book that I am happy to inhabit.
Here we have a politician and a young man attached to a family more affluent and more worldly than his own, but there I think the comparisons to The Line of Beauty should end. There are flashbacks to Dave’s youth, ‘a chaos of privilege and prejudice’; Hollinghurst captures beautifully the details of the 1960s with a light touch, the mention of a particular car here, a new and exciting tape recorder there. It’s the almost ubiquitous racism that really stings the modern reader’s eyes though: people either don’t know what to say to Dave or feel all too confident in saying unpalatable things, making Esme’s blunt warmth even more refreshing.
I recognised in myself Dave wanting to tell his mother about his stay with the Hadlows but ‘even more to keep these things to myself’; Hollinghurst puts into words a thought or a feeling I have had that has not quite crystallised. Observations can be mundane yet delicious, commonplace and universal. Hollinghurst does not avoid explicit content but uses allusion for impact when Dave has his first proper sexual encounter, rendered simply as ‘we … moved on to the astonishing next stage’. The pacing is great throughout and the end, in the near-present, hit me with a whump of shock.
Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize in 2004 and is shortly to be given The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence so he hardly needs my endorsement, but I’m happy to say I loved Our Evenings. My deflation at finishing it is tempered by the delicious doorstopper of The Stranger’s Child waiting to be read and seeing the man himself at Cheltenham Literary Festival.
Thanks to Picador for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley.