Alan Hollinghurst explores identity and political change in his latest novel, Our Evenings

When British novelist Alan Hollinghurst first began writing in the 1980s, he made a conscious choice about the stories he was going to tell.

“From the beginning, I just took the decision that I was always going to write from a gay perspective and take that for granted,” he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.

He’s since become known for his novels, which document the lives of gay men and the world around them, including The Swimming-Pool Library, Booker Prize-winner The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. 

Hollinghurst’s latest novel, Our Evenings, also centres on a gay character, but dives into new territory for the author — writing from the point of view of a biracial character. 

Our Evenings tells the story of Dave Win, the son of a white British dressmaker and a Burmese father he’s never met, from his time growing up in small-town England in the 1960s to the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. 

“I’d become more and more interested by this question of seeing life from a different racial perspective,” said Hollinghurst. “And indeed, it seems to me, a fascinating and increasingly urgent question in our present culture.”

That being said, Hollinghurst still wanted to draw from his own personal experiences in writing this story. 

“I thought the mixed race thing would be quite an interesting way of doing it. And the person could be, as it were, partly me, but with this further significant difference.”

In fact, Dave follows part of Hollinghurst’s life trajectory in that they both grew up in a small town, attended Oxford University and moved to London as young men, experiencing queer community for the first time.

Writing Dave in the first person allowed Hollinghurst to justifiably withhold information and admit to the “limitations” of his own knowledge. 

“I was going back into territory that I remembered myself. I thought my own little memoir, like access to school days and university days … could all feed into it.”

On the outside looking in 

In Our Evenings, 13-year-old Dave is awarded a scholarship to a prestigious boys’ boarding school, where he grapples with his burgeoning sexuality and the racism and classism that comes from being a brown boy from a working-class background among England’s wealthy elite. 

This shift from small-town England to boarding school was particularly salient for Hollinghurst as a writer who is drawn to portraying characters who are on the outside looking in.

“He goes into a new sort of social dimension,” said Hollinghurst, “… but also retains within him a sense of the values of the world from which he’s come.”

Through Dave, Hollinghurst was hoping to touch on “race and race itself as an excluder,” all while making sure that Dave is clever, bright and optimistic and still the hero of his own story.

“I didn’t want to write a victim narrative in which he’s constantly crushed by circumstance, but he keeps on coming up against these ceilings of walls which prevent his advance,” said Hollinghurst.

A story spanning years

Our Evenings is divided into two parts: the first, a slower-paced telling of Dave’s schooling, and the second, a dizzying account of his entire adult life out in the world.

“I wanted to create that experience, which everybody else finds as they get older, of time speeding up,” said Hollinghurst. 

The passage of time throughout the novel also sees some drastic changes in England’s politics, both overtly and subtly.

“Though the book isn’t at all about politics, it had a sort of political presence and urgency about it,” said Hollinghurst.

In the most clear sense, the politics in Our Evenings revolve around Britain in the European Union, since the story starts in the 60s, when Britain was first trying to join, and ends with it leaving.

“But I suppose running through the narrative, there is a changing picture of the relations of increasingly liberated, prominent out gay people,” he said. 

How time shaped the “gay novel”

This changing picture is also reflected in the idea of the “gay novel,” of which Hollinghurst is said to be one of the pioneering authors. 

When Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, the media widely commented that it was the first time that a book centered on gay experiences had won the award. 

And while he was glad the book could attract attention on those grounds, he found it interesting that that was the main thing people were talking about in relation to his work. 

“The gayness wasn’t the only interesting thing about the books,” he said. 

Hollinghurst noted that when he started writing, the so-called “gay novel” was a phenomenon —  but it has now made its way more into the mainstream. 

“It was opening up whole areas of experience which really hadn’t been written about in this kind of literary fiction before,” he said. 

“It was recording the exhilaration of liberation, and then very soon afterwards, it was dealing with the whole crisis of AIDS, which itself, of course, changed in all sorts of adverse ways, the political situation.”

Still, Hollinghurst recognizes the shifting tides of global perspectives on queer life, which are transforming continuously, for better or worse.

“I’m extremely aware of how vulnerable the freedoms of equality and so on, which we take for granted … are being politicized, demonized and taken away.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.