Toujours la même chose
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings
Picador, 496pp, £22.00, ISBN 9781447208235
reviewed by Stuart Walton
One of Alan Hollinghurst's favoured novelistic techniques is the casual introduction among his fictional dramatis personae of people from outside the realms of invention. Still the most daring incidence of this is the extended scene in The Line of Beauty (2004), set in the 1980s, in which the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher makes an appearance, taking a stately turn around the dancefloor with its central character, Nick Guest. It is a moment both chilling in its monstrosity, and studiedly hilarious, something between Madame Tussaud and Spitting Image. In his latest work, Our Evenings, one among those of her predecessors Thatcher cordially despised, Harold Macmillan, looks in, caught not en fête but in ceremonial array, in his capacity as Chancellor of Oxford University, to award an essay prize to the narrator, David Win. As the laureate reads out his work, he notices a subtle crack about Edward VII eliciting a 'nod of amusement from Macmillan himself, in the throne'.
Baroness Thatcher returns here for a Hitchcock-like cameo, present only as the signatory of a short Foreword in a book of Tory think-pieces. Her barely tolerated successor David Cameron is there, albeit only in the wings. In a briefly stunning instant, Joan Collins crosses the stage. What feels like the fictional equivalent of breaking the fourth wall is all the more apposite in a novel that concerns itself with the theatre world, the poverty-stricken milieu of experimental fringe theatre and its gruelling touring schedules, as well as the canonical Shakespeare productions.
The novel's cast of characters consists of a handful of principals, and a host of walking players whose names we are not obliged to remember. David — or Dave as he is known lifelong by his nearest and dearest — is the son of an English mother and a Burmese father whom he never knew. Awarded an exhibition place at a private school in the home counties, he is drawn vocationally to acting, for which he has a natural aptitude, a preference that, at a crucial juncture in his CV, will prove victorious over the academic study of history. His school sponsors, Mark and Cara Hadlow, loom large throughout, leading the well-upholstered lives of moneyed arts patrons. Their daughter Lydia goes off to New York to help out at Andy Warhol's Factory, while the son, Giles, who bullies Dave at school and subjects him to casual sexual assaults, will become a bloviating Tory careerist, one of the pre-eminent champions of Brexit in Cameron's cabinet, a rhino-hide philistine eventually appointed Minister for the Arts, always a humiliation for a Tory, at least until Nadine Dorries rose to the gleeful challenge of undermining the system from within.
Giles bookends Our Evenings, a scoffing sub-Flashman ruffian in Dave's adolescent springtime and a pantomime nuisance at the sapless end of life, spending the long idle interim in the novel's dressing-room. He is too comical to be depressing, and too depressing to be worth worrying about, with the result that his presence in the earliest and latest phases of the story feels like a piece of misdirection. There are more immediate, and more insidiously manifested, forms of social oppression than Giles. We learn that, as a boy of dual heritage, Dave has his father's brown skin, although not which of the multifarious ethnic groups of Burma, as it was then known, he has inherited it from. While he is still a teenager, his widowed mother, a dressmaker, moves in with one of her clients, a divorced woman named Esme, with whom she forms what will turn out to be a lifelong relationship, and for which she will be excommunicated with savage abruptness by her brother, Dave's Uncle Brian. The tensions between the establishment world of independent schooling and Oxbridge, even of the kind of touring theatre in which drop-of-the-hat nudity was a sine qua non, and the complicated ethnicity and sexuality of his own family life, drive the push and pull of Dave's inner world.
These are the lineaments of Our Evenings that distinguish it from its six predecessors in the Hollinghurst oeuvre. Otherwise, in form and tone and structure, it is very much of a piece with the others. They are episodic rather than plot-driven novels, written in mostly shortish chapters in a series of what feel like sketches, vignettes that fade at the edges into the surrounding blank spaces, their dynamics largely derived from occasionally arch, mostly workaday dialogue. What has come to stand in for narrative momentum in the more recent novels — The Stranger's Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) — is the longue durée of passing decades. Our Evenings is structured by the autobiographical relating of almost the full lifetime of its central character, his first-person narration not precluding Dave's final passing, an eventuality that is no more a spoiler in a review than it is in life.
The temporality of an entire life can confer its own epic dimensions on even the most dismal or absurd of existences. Nabokov's Van Veen in Ada, or Ardor (1969), or Ibsen's Peer Gynt, run out their courses from roughneck adolescence to the spiritual scandal of foolish fond old dotage, so that by the end of their stories, it feels as though a great epoch in history has unfolded. Dave Win in his seventies, by contrast, sounds much the same as he did when he was at Bampton School, with the same physical desires, the same aesthetic proclivities, the same stoically endured sense of small differences from the society in which he continues to mingle. The identity of the ghastly politicians might change, but essentially it's toujours la même chose.
One of the traps laid by a life told in first-person retrospect is that it is too easily recollected in the tranquillity of the final act, but Dave started out tranquil. His politeness is unfailing, whatever the weather. He is a credit to his mum. Following a preamble in his septuagenarian present, the magic lantern promptly whirls us back to the rough-and-tumble of his schooldays. The events are recounted throughout, though, with the unengaged quiescence of somebody whose life, from troubled origins, turned out quite manageably after all. The victimisation and sexual assaults of adolescence are neither traumatising nor enraging — hardly worth mentioning, it seems — and the ambiguous attentions of schoolteachers do not prompt analysis or reflection. Lovers come and go with the decades, none of them provoking much noticeable passion or heartache. Hollinghurst's prose was once replete with three-dimensional sex, but the authorial camera now tends to fade to black as each encounter precipitates. Dave sticks with his boyfriends, not always in steadfast fidelity, but when they vanish over the horizon, they are barely and quickly mourned. There will be another one along in a minute.
All of this suggests an existential mood, something of the affectlessness of contemporary fictions, the minimalist formal games of writers forty years younger than Hollinghurst, the more conscientious among whom might give a bleached eye-tooth for a fraction of his literary elegance. The elegance too, though, feels as though it has dwindled noticeably in recent works. There is hardly a commissioning editor in London now who would buy off the peg the sort of writing in this passage, describing a firework display at a reception for former pupils at Bampton:
Young authors who shun such style see only a self-conscious, anachronistic fanciness to it — the sonorous frazzle-dazzle, that Jamesian 'grandeur of delay', the final metaphysical flourish — because they suspect it of performing a bogus rhetorical elevation of the everyday, for something as essentially brainless as staring at fireworks. The brainlessness of life is better told in a brainless idiom, it is felt, at least until the serial killer gets to work.
Alan Hollinghurst is not a didactic writer, nor ever was. His work, unless one is particularly insistent on finding them, is largely capable of making do without the hypostatising themes taught in Creative Writing. In the early novels, The Folding Star (1994) pre-eminently, there was an air of heterodox courage to this. Now that the narrative tuning feels flatter, the prose shades incriminatingly often into mere editorialising. In the final stretches of Our Evenings, the Brexit referendum produces a chorus of lamentation, with Giles engaged in 'insulting pretences at negotiation with heads of the EU'. That all sounds horribly familiar, in every sense. But then a string quartet plays some Haydn. Relatives die. Life goes on, until it doesn't.
In chapter 34, prior to the post-mortem coda provided by Dave's final partner, Richard, the two go and look at the Hadlows' Berkshire farmhouse, where the whole narrative began 60 years and 470 pages ago. On a high and windy hill, a parking area for hikers, with the sun beginning symbolically to set over the fields and hedgerows, the pang of yesteryear is evoked. Dave 'trie[s] to explain' it all to Richard, but not to us. Richard doesn't quite get it. There are some mature beech trees along the driveway that had just been planted when Dave was a boy. 'Well, that was fifty years ago, love,' Richard reminds him, reminding him too that every individual past lies tightly coiled, chafing sometimes but untransmissible, within each one of us. Plus which, it's getting cold.
Baroness Thatcher returns here for a Hitchcock-like cameo, present only as the signatory of a short Foreword in a book of Tory think-pieces. Her barely tolerated successor David Cameron is there, albeit only in the wings. In a briefly stunning instant, Joan Collins crosses the stage. What feels like the fictional equivalent of breaking the fourth wall is all the more apposite in a novel that concerns itself with the theatre world, the poverty-stricken milieu of experimental fringe theatre and its gruelling touring schedules, as well as the canonical Shakespeare productions.
The novel's cast of characters consists of a handful of principals, and a host of walking players whose names we are not obliged to remember. David — or Dave as he is known lifelong by his nearest and dearest — is the son of an English mother and a Burmese father whom he never knew. Awarded an exhibition place at a private school in the home counties, he is drawn vocationally to acting, for which he has a natural aptitude, a preference that, at a crucial juncture in his CV, will prove victorious over the academic study of history. His school sponsors, Mark and Cara Hadlow, loom large throughout, leading the well-upholstered lives of moneyed arts patrons. Their daughter Lydia goes off to New York to help out at Andy Warhol's Factory, while the son, Giles, who bullies Dave at school and subjects him to casual sexual assaults, will become a bloviating Tory careerist, one of the pre-eminent champions of Brexit in Cameron's cabinet, a rhino-hide philistine eventually appointed Minister for the Arts, always a humiliation for a Tory, at least until Nadine Dorries rose to the gleeful challenge of undermining the system from within.
Giles bookends Our Evenings, a scoffing sub-Flashman ruffian in Dave's adolescent springtime and a pantomime nuisance at the sapless end of life, spending the long idle interim in the novel's dressing-room. He is too comical to be depressing, and too depressing to be worth worrying about, with the result that his presence in the earliest and latest phases of the story feels like a piece of misdirection. There are more immediate, and more insidiously manifested, forms of social oppression than Giles. We learn that, as a boy of dual heritage, Dave has his father's brown skin, although not which of the multifarious ethnic groups of Burma, as it was then known, he has inherited it from. While he is still a teenager, his widowed mother, a dressmaker, moves in with one of her clients, a divorced woman named Esme, with whom she forms what will turn out to be a lifelong relationship, and for which she will be excommunicated with savage abruptness by her brother, Dave's Uncle Brian. The tensions between the establishment world of independent schooling and Oxbridge, even of the kind of touring theatre in which drop-of-the-hat nudity was a sine qua non, and the complicated ethnicity and sexuality of his own family life, drive the push and pull of Dave's inner world.
These are the lineaments of Our Evenings that distinguish it from its six predecessors in the Hollinghurst oeuvre. Otherwise, in form and tone and structure, it is very much of a piece with the others. They are episodic rather than plot-driven novels, written in mostly shortish chapters in a series of what feel like sketches, vignettes that fade at the edges into the surrounding blank spaces, their dynamics largely derived from occasionally arch, mostly workaday dialogue. What has come to stand in for narrative momentum in the more recent novels — The Stranger's Child (2011) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) — is the longue durée of passing decades. Our Evenings is structured by the autobiographical relating of almost the full lifetime of its central character, his first-person narration not precluding Dave's final passing, an eventuality that is no more a spoiler in a review than it is in life.
The temporality of an entire life can confer its own epic dimensions on even the most dismal or absurd of existences. Nabokov's Van Veen in Ada, or Ardor (1969), or Ibsen's Peer Gynt, run out their courses from roughneck adolescence to the spiritual scandal of foolish fond old dotage, so that by the end of their stories, it feels as though a great epoch in history has unfolded. Dave Win in his seventies, by contrast, sounds much the same as he did when he was at Bampton School, with the same physical desires, the same aesthetic proclivities, the same stoically endured sense of small differences from the society in which he continues to mingle. The identity of the ghastly politicians might change, but essentially it's toujours la même chose.
One of the traps laid by a life told in first-person retrospect is that it is too easily recollected in the tranquillity of the final act, but Dave started out tranquil. His politeness is unfailing, whatever the weather. He is a credit to his mum. Following a preamble in his septuagenarian present, the magic lantern promptly whirls us back to the rough-and-tumble of his schooldays. The events are recounted throughout, though, with the unengaged quiescence of somebody whose life, from troubled origins, turned out quite manageably after all. The victimisation and sexual assaults of adolescence are neither traumatising nor enraging — hardly worth mentioning, it seems — and the ambiguous attentions of schoolteachers do not prompt analysis or reflection. Lovers come and go with the decades, none of them provoking much noticeable passion or heartache. Hollinghurst's prose was once replete with three-dimensional sex, but the authorial camera now tends to fade to black as each encounter precipitates. Dave sticks with his boyfriends, not always in steadfast fidelity, but when they vanish over the horizon, they are barely and quickly mourned. There will be another one along in a minute.
All of this suggests an existential mood, something of the affectlessness of contemporary fictions, the minimalist formal games of writers forty years younger than Hollinghurst, the more conscientious among whom might give a bleached eye-tooth for a fraction of his literary elegance. The elegance too, though, feels as though it has dwindled noticeably in recent works. There is hardly a commissioning editor in London now who would buy off the peg the sort of writing in this passage, describing a firework display at a reception for former pupils at Bampton:
. . .a pair of rockets, a fraction out of synch, shot upwards into the murk. Nothing happened for a bit, till high above two gold chrysanthemums of light bloomed dazzlingly and seemed for the space of an indrawn breath to die, then flared and scattered in a dozen frazzled comets traced on darkness, leaving a spilling column of pink smoke as a deep boom, with a certain grandeur of delay, reached us and re-echoed from the house beyond. All this in three seconds perhaps, but a gap in time opened at the wonder of the thing.
Young authors who shun such style see only a self-conscious, anachronistic fanciness to it — the sonorous frazzle-dazzle, that Jamesian 'grandeur of delay', the final metaphysical flourish — because they suspect it of performing a bogus rhetorical elevation of the everyday, for something as essentially brainless as staring at fireworks. The brainlessness of life is better told in a brainless idiom, it is felt, at least until the serial killer gets to work.
Alan Hollinghurst is not a didactic writer, nor ever was. His work, unless one is particularly insistent on finding them, is largely capable of making do without the hypostatising themes taught in Creative Writing. In the early novels, The Folding Star (1994) pre-eminently, there was an air of heterodox courage to this. Now that the narrative tuning feels flatter, the prose shades incriminatingly often into mere editorialising. In the final stretches of Our Evenings, the Brexit referendum produces a chorus of lamentation, with Giles engaged in 'insulting pretences at negotiation with heads of the EU'. That all sounds horribly familiar, in every sense. But then a string quartet plays some Haydn. Relatives die. Life goes on, until it doesn't.
In chapter 34, prior to the post-mortem coda provided by Dave's final partner, Richard, the two go and look at the Hadlows' Berkshire farmhouse, where the whole narrative began 60 years and 470 pages ago. On a high and windy hill, a parking area for hikers, with the sun beginning symbolically to set over the fields and hedgerows, the pang of yesteryear is evoked. Dave 'trie[s] to explain' it all to Richard, but not to us. Richard doesn't quite get it. There are some mature beech trees along the driveway that had just been planted when Dave was a boy. 'Well, that was fifty years ago, love,' Richard reminds him, reminding him too that every individual past lies tightly coiled, chafing sometimes but untransmissible, within each one of us. Plus which, it's getting cold.