The British Spiritual Twilight

In Alan Hollinghurst’s lush, symphonic Our Evenings, the arc of history bends toward Brexit. “I have the power. You don’t,” says House Captain Harris, nicknamed “Fash,” as in “Fascist,” one of the many upper-class bullies planted like bridge trolls throughout the life of narrator Dave Win. The political weft of modern history is woven into the coming-of-age story of Hollinghurst’s gay, half-Burmese protagonist. Raised by his white, working-class single mother in an austere market town, Win lives out the arc of a queer British Bildungsroman. We follow him from rural obscurity to public school to Oxford to the London stage. We’re with him through love affairs, golden evenings, sweaty nights, and country weekends. But here, as in The Swimming-Pool Library, a sharper reality scatters fragments of darkness in the soaring prose, like a deliberate flaw in the design. As the tragic, beautiful, brilliant Win soars and crashes through rapturous sentences, something not too far off in the distance is going horribly wrong. Worse, it’s getting closer by the day.

Hollinghurst is rare among his age cohort of literary English novelists: he hasn’t grown reactionary, anti-Islamist, transphobic, enraged at wokeness, or poisoned with privilege. Where several of his fellow baby boomers at the height of the literary profession have broken against the paradoxes of modern life, Hollinghurst dances through them. Patient and generous, his rage and ego sublimated, he writes like no one writes anymore, like no one feels the need to write anymore. Hollinghurst gives us a gift we didn’t realize we needed, so inured are we to half-baked prose and cranky narratives set in a perpetual 1992. Somehow, he avoided the Islamophobia of the late Martin Amis, the transphobia of Ian McEwan, and the political paranoia of Howard Jacobson. Though two decades older than Zadie Smith, his prose shimmers with a more honest politics and a more radical presentation of power dynamics through intimate relationships.

Our Evenings captures the foreboding of our political era: an abiding dread that worms its way into our quietest moments, our long nights of the soul punctuated with apocalyptic frisson. Hollinghurst mirrors the contemporary experience of waiting for the gradual pull of history to take us down with it. Structuring the narrative in Our Evenings is the relationship David Win has with Tory politician and former schoolmate, Giles Hadlow. Early on,