Our Evenings (5*)

Alan Hollinghurst clearly didn't get the memo instructing old white men to avoid first-person narratives about people of color.  It's a good thing, because Our Evenings is a spellbinding feat of projection that neatly manages to convey how sensibility can matter as much as race and class in the grand scheme of things.

I've been a Hollinghurst stan since the very beginning.  We're just nine months apart in age which means we've been influenced by the same world events and have benefitted from greater tolerance of homosexuality.  In some respects, Hollinghurst owes the success of his career--and his Booker Prize--to the latter, although it would have been interesting to see if sublimation of his gay themes might have brought him a wider audience as it did for writers like Henry James,  E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee.

Dave, the product of a brief and mysterious liaison between a Burmese man and his British secretary, narrates Our Evenings which is as much about him as his beloved mother, an upwardly mobile dressmaker.  He discovers they have more in common that either first thinks when he's forced to piss out of the window of her business partner's posh home, which has just become his own.

When the novel begins, Dave is a young scholarship student visiting the country home of his patron, Mark Hadlow, a member of the British establishment as interested in art and good works as he is in making money and spawning evil.  Hadlow also happens to be the father of Dave's classmate, Giles, a bully who, in the novel's only shortcoming, functions more as a specter of reactionary politics than a flesh and blood character.  Dave thwarts Giles's schoolboy advances by locking his guest room door, a move that appears to incite decades of enmity as Giles becomes a powerful minister with a helicopter he uses for highly audible payback.

Hollinghurst gradually reveals Dave's biracial heritage through the mostly less-than-enlightened reactions of other characters, including Giles's grandmother, a French actress of a certain age and some repute.  Witness to the young man's thespian talents during an impromptu at-home rehearsal, Elise bluntly assesses his future as an actor:

‘If you have the gift,’ she said, ‘you can do anything. But it will be difficult for you.’ She gave me the pondering stare of someone needing to be frank as well as supportive. ‘Not because of your talent, but because of how people see you. I can tell you, I have worked with…I’ve worked with all sorts of people, Algerians, for instance, and with the most fascinating Indian actors. It’s not easy for them. Well, in India, of course, they make their own films, but in France, and in England, these actors by and large have to play what we call the mauvais rôles…you understand?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Or of course you can do radio.’

Elise is almost right. Dave soon finds work playing ethnic roles on the telly, and his often nude performances with an avant garde theatre company lead to an offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company where he barely lasts a season.  He does not, however, become embittered and remains mostly incurious about his father's background because he considers himself as English as any of his peers. Look no further than his spot-on impersonations of British stereotypes like Jeeves--made even funnier by his skin color--for evidence. All the world's a stage for Dave.  

Dave also finds love several times, first with a crush on a boundary-adhering English teacher at Bampton, the public school he and Giles attend.  Mr. Hudson supervises the Record Club and takes a special interest in Dave, perhaps for his exoticism.  They spend hours together alone, chastely dissecting the beauty of classical music. A lovely piece by Leoš Janáček, a Czech composer, gives the novel its name and much later, its raison d'etre when Dave muses how satisfying the time he has spent with other men, off-stage, has been:

When we first met, the phrase was our term for the teasingly rationed three or four times a week we saw each other, both of us still wary at having found so exactly what we wanted. Then the caution seemed absurd and the evenings joined up into one unguarded time together.

Hollinghurst similarly uses pop music to nail the Swinging Sixties when free love could be mistaken for homosexuality.  Here's Dave pondering his unrequited love for a gay-friendly classmate at Oxford with whom he spends the night after getting high and listening to Cream's Disraeli Gears, track-by-track.

It was hard to see exactly where we were treading. My confusion in the shadowy time-lapse of thought and action, being truly stoned, as Nick said, muffled the dismay of rejection. It was somehow as if we’d had an affair, broken up and agreed to remain the best of friends, all in four minutes. In a few more seconds we might decide to get together again.

Once Nick gently rejects Dave, he encourages him to pursue his acting--which a critic for The Times has lauded for its "tireless brilliance"--as a sort of consolation prize for choking during his final exams at Oxford.

I said, ‘Have you noticed I don’t look much like, say, Alan Bates?’ and smiled, to soften my sharp tone. Sometimes Nick’s absolute unconsciousness of my appearance, my difference, a sort of ethical beauty in him, seemed to verge on a blander disregard for the whole problem.

Yet "a blander disregard for the whole problem" (i.e. white privilege in a nutshell), is better than the political alternative, which rears its ugly, ugly head by the novel's shattering end. Although Dave never makes racism the central issue of his life, the pandemic unleashes random forces that return it to the forefront.  Giles, who once characterized his house guest and school mate as "a brown bastard" finally wins the struggle for dominance that he began half a century earlier, in the shadow of colonialism.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," as Elise might have said.