“I’ve never wanted to write a state-of-the-nation novel,” says Alan Hollinghurst, before dismissing this lofty descriptor as a “dread phrase”. His latest tome – and at nearly 500 pages, Our Evenings really is a tome – leans into some prickly topical themes. Its ambitious fragmented narrative confronts race, class, sexuality, identity and Brexit Britain – a dread phrase in itself – but Hollinghurst is too subtle and accomplished a writer to slip into polemic. “One or two people have said to me that this book is sort of [about] ‘where we are now’, which is fine,” he says, “but I certainly didn’t set out to do that. What I’m interested in is the particularities of life, not the generalities.”
We’re sitting in the living room of Hollinghurst’s smart but unstuffy London flat, which looks out over the treetops of Hampstead Heath. The revered novelist, 70, has lived here for nearly half his life and seems completely settled. When his bank balance swelled in the mid-00s after he won the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, probably the greatest of his six previous novels, he realised there was nowhere else he’d rather call home, so he acquired another floor of the same house. After offering water – “still or sparkling?” – he joins me on the sofa and talks generously about Our Evenings for a full hour.
Hollinghurst’s new novel arrives seven years after his last, 2017’s equally sweeping The Sparsholt Affair – both books tell a story episodically across a 60-year timespan. Since he published his first novel, 1988’s The Swimming-Pool Library, a dazzling landmark in queer literature, he has generally spent six or seven years perfecting the next one. “I think there’s so much about a book that just happens,” he says. “I do a lot of planning, but there is also an instinctual dimension [where] you just do things because you have a feeling that it will be right. Then later you find yourself being asked to rationalise it.” Hollinghurst pauses, then adds wryly: “Generally, reassuringly, you find there was a reason for what you did.”
Our Evenings contains some shocking and harrowing moments, but it is also poignant, erotic and deliciously witty. Famously, The Line of Beauty features a brief but unforgettable appearance from Margaret Thatcher, whose presence looms large over its 1980s-set story. Our Evenings also has a gorgeously drawn walk-on from a formidable female with dodgy politics: Joan Collins. “She flirted and she was also a little like royalty, to those who are susceptible, bestowing the magic of her attention,” notes the novel’s protagonist, Dave Win, after he glimpses the actress at a West End party. “I’ve always felt I can’t write about real people as characters,” Hollinghurst says, “so they have to appear in these sort of cameos.”
Our Evenings unfolds through the eyes of Dave Win, a boarding school scholarship boy who wins a place at Oxford – a staple Hollinghurst location – before building a career as an actor. “Dave is actually a bit older than me,” Hollinghurst says, “but I wanted to tell the story of someone who’s lived through the [same] time I’ve lived through. And like other protagonists of mine, he has the outsiderliness of being gay.” The Swimming-Pool Library follows the adventures of William Beckwith, a charismatic Oxford graduate with the means and sex appeal to enjoy everything that gay London had to offer before the devastation of HIV/Aids. The Line of Beauty centres on Nick Guest, a middle-class climber who is enveloped by a powerful right-wing family with a direct line to Thatcher.
However, Dave has what Hollinghurst calls “another dimension” of otherness. We meet him in the early 60s as he deals with the cruelty and confusion of being a mixed-race boy in an overwhelmingly white Home Counties town. Though young Dave is never physically assaulted, “violence” is the only word that does justice to the overt and thinly veiled racism he is subjected to. Hollinghurst says he was “always curious about the idea of writing from a different racial perspective,” but acknowledges that “this is, of course, fraught with hazards” – namely, the risk of cultural appropriation. But somehow Dave, the son of a white English mother and a mysterious Burmese father whom he has never met, felt more within his ken.
“I used to think the problem would be running out of ideas as you got older. But the opposite is true: there is too much to write about” – Alan Hollinghurst
“Obviously, I wasn’t going to write from the persona of a Jamaican man or anything like that,” Hollinghurst says. “But to have a biracial person whose [Burmese] heritage is almost completely unknown to him, and who is just moving through life, being turned into a kind of model little Englishman because he is clever and gifted, that seemed to me, from the start, an interesting thing to tackle.” Actually, if Dave weren’t written with such rich detail and heartbreaking empathy, he would almost seem like the perfect vessel to expose British society’s unwitting prejudices. Many of the characters he encounters struggle to “place” him racially as well as in terms of class. Dave is the son of a lower-middle-class lone parent – still a big deal in the 1960s – but has had a fancy public school education. One of his boyfriends teases him for speaking with the cut-glass accent of 1940s actress Anna Neagle.
Dave’s career as a respected jobbing actor also makes him uncategorisable, partly because he never achieves the kind of blindsiding fame that might make bigots overlook his race and sexuality. “Early on, he knows how to mimic people and I suppose that’s, in a way, him sort of taking control of the situation,” Hollinghurst says. “I wanted him to be someone who has that kind of fluidity which an actor must necessarily have. He’s someone who’s finding a role for himself but [also] having roles imposed on him by others.”
As we follow Dave from the 1960s to the pandemic, he is almost haunted by Giles Hadlow, the rather sadistic son of the otherwise benevolent family who funded his education. The two men never become friends, but their paths cross as points in the novel as Giles becomes a prominent Tory MP and Brexiteer. “The political element is essential, but it’s also rather external in the narrative,” Hollinghurst says. “This is really the life story of Dave, someone who grows and changes, [whereas] I wanted Giles to be someone who doesn’t have an inner life. I wasn’t interested in psychologising him or evoking any sympathy. He’s just this obstacle which seems to have disappeared but keeps coming back.”
Throughout Our Evenings, Dave’s romantic and professional life in London is threaded elegantly with his family life in Berkshire. His mother Avril, already toughened by bringing up her mixed-race son in less enlightened times, enters into a loving quasi-marriage with Esme Croft, a well-off divorcée who has no interest in finding another husband. Hollinghurst says their quietly defiant same-sex relationship – they don’t hide it from the community, but neither do they broadcast it – was inspired by two women who ran a local tea shop when he was growing up in Gloucestershire. “Did my parents think of them as lesbians, or did they never admit that thought?” he wonders. “I shall never know, but perhaps it was easier for women, in a way, to live together as companions. I mean, there was probably some sort of euphemism for it that would have been more striking if two men had settled down together.”
At this point in his distinguished career, it’s impossible not to compare each new Hollinghurst novel to The Line of Beauty – that’s what happens when you write a masterpiece. But if that book felt a bit like a punch to the gut, especially for queer readers, Our Evenings leaves a different lingering impression – one that is poignant, contemplative and profoundly moving. It may not be his state-of-the-nation novel, but it definitely makes you think about the society we live in. “I’ve always thought that I write rather peculiar fragments of the bigger picture and often that the protagonists are rather strange people,” he says. “You know, they’re not archetypal people, particularly, and they’re not idealised people. They’re people with their own flaws and problems.”
Revealingly, Hollinghurst says he has always “resisted” the idea of writing purely “admirable” gay characters, even after The Swimming-Pool Library came out and established his literary reputation “at a time of huge anti-gay hostility”. He says he felt “some sort of requirement to be a ‘representative’ gay writer,” but “didn’t like being told what to do”. In 1998’s The Spell, perhaps his most undervalued novel, timid civil servant Alex Nichols blows open his life after falling for a younger man and discovering drugs. Fortunately for us, it sounds as though there are other flawed protagonists to come. “Each time I publish a book, I find myself looking back further, and different periods of my earlier life – periods I hadn’t ever really focused on – suddenly open up,” he says. “I used to think the problem would be running out of ideas as you got older. But the opposite is true: there is too much to write about.”
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is published by Pan Macmillan, and is out now.