Our Evenings

The novel implicitly asks the reader to compare Dave’s first book, the professional and possibly advice-giving memoir Acting as a Career, with the much more personal and emotionally honest narrative that becomes Our Evenings. While we don’t have many details about the first book, it seems to be a very standard kind of autobiography—one that focuses on the experiences that have made Dave well-known and is accompanied by a traditional book tour, complete with readings and autograph signings. In contrast, Dave’s composition of his more complete autobiography is so intensely moving that he hides what he is doing even from Richard. We can surmise that some of this impulse to keep his writing secret comes from Dave’s lifelong burden of not knowing much about his ancestry on his father’s side; he has never been to Burma or had any contact with his Burmese heritage. After his mother’s death, the sight of the longyi reignites his desire to know more of that side of the family, but Jane cannot tell him a great deal. She explains that Avril did not know his father well and may only have met him two or three times.

The Brexit vote was an extremely important event in the United Kingdom. It came as a surprise to many that a larger percentage of voters chose to leave (51.9%) than to remain (48.1%) in the EU. Nearly half of the “leavers” said that the most important issue for them was that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK, not by the EU. However, the novel points that the pro-Brexit movement came primarily from the Conservative Party faction for whom banning immigration was also a strong issue; this is the group that Giles Hadlow represents in the novel. Giles’s history of personal bigotry against people like Dave undercuts the ostensible claims that leaving the EU is about self-determination rather than a backlash driven by bias against people of color.

The emphasis in the last two chapters is very much on the past—the passing of people and things. Mark Hadlow’s death marks the end of an era, as he represented a benevolent patrician approach that is no longer seen as the way to balance the inequities of having privilege. However, Mark’s funeral reveals the degree of cultural change in attitudes to gay relationships. Giles’s son David is openly with his male partner at the memorial for his grandfather, something that would not have been possible in Dave’s youth. Gay marriage was legalized in Britain in 2013; Dave notes that Giles, pointedly, abstained from the vote in Parliament. Dave’s nostalgic trip back to Woolpack, which makes him ponder how things have changed, is another elegiac moment. Dave is surprised at how shabby the farm looks now that he has had wide experience of the world, but this does not recolor his memories of his weekend there as a boy.

The novel ends in a shocking manner, with Dave’s violent death. However, although the brutal attack depicted in the Coda seems surprising, the novel has been building to this expression of Racism and Prejudice in its foregrounding of Giles, Brexit, and the fact that while antigay bigotry is shown to recede, racism is a constant in Dave’s experiences. Hollinghurst pulls the rug out from under the reader with authorial sleight of hand, as the first-person narrator we assume to be Dave turns out to now be Richard. The statistics that Richard cites about the rise in hate crimes against Chinese and other East Asian people during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic are factual.