Our Evenings explores a young, often cruel, existence at a British boys' boarding school; later fits and starts of exploring sexuality and expressing vulnerability; a growing love for acting; and seeking and finding a path toward living a genuine life.
Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I'd lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.
Young Dave Win, the son of a Burmese father he never met and a devoted, kind seamstress mother, attends a prestigious boarding school on scholarship in the 1960s.
His social position is fragile because of his mixed race and his modest background. He dodges unwelcome attention, begins to love to act in plays, and explores his feelings about other boys.
Dave's scholarship benefactors are a couple flush with family money, interested in the arts and matter-of-fact about supporting causes they care about. Their selfish, bull-headed, sometimes cruel son Giles is a classmate of Dave's, and when Dave is invited to stay with the family during school breaks, he is fascinated by the library, the talk of literature, ideas, and plays, and by grown-up discussions of the world. But as a price for temporary forays into upper-crust life, he must navigate Giles's physical aggressions, rude comments, and unwelcome sexual interest.
Later, Giles and his parents will separately pop in and out of Dave's adult life at crucial moments--his parents as supportive sometime-benefactors, and Giles as a depressingly predictable bully of a politician.
Dave shares the stories of his young life as though in a dream: it was repeatedly quite alarming to me as a reader to anticipate and then hear accounts or murmurings of various terrible cruelties inflicted upon Dave (and other young boys). But Dave never paints himself as a victim or feels righteous rage; his account treats such occurrences without dramatic editorial comment, as though they are commonplace--and, for him and his vulnerable schoolmates, they are.
His later life, in graduate school and then as an actor, offers his evolution into and realization of his true self, which is gratifying to read, as well as the heartbreaking fits and starts of his explorations of his sexuality and, ultimately, a satisfying amount of growth and his ability to be vulnerable with other men. Meanwhile, his small-town mother is exploring her feelings for a wealthy woman who is also her business investor, despite malicious gossip and judgment from the community.
Our Evenings trails the various impacts of the authority of wealth, abuse of power, and cruelties of the mighty inflicted upon the powerless. The story also explores Dave's and his mother's personal, individual paths through various experiences of bigotry to living life honestly and freely with partners they love.
I appreciated the fullness of the arc of Dave's life, while feeling relatively little emotional attachment to it. I listened to Our Evenings as an audiobook.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this book!
Alan Hollinghurst is also the author of The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty; and The Stranger's Child.
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