56 pages • 1-hour read
Our Evenings
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Themes
Discovering and Accepting One’s Sexual Orientation
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, racism, and antigay bias.
Dave realizes in his mid-teens that he is attracted to boys and men. This becomes apparent when he vacations in Devon with his mother and Mrs. Esme Croft. He is attracted to the waiter Marco and a man named Ollie whom he sees on the beach. Also, the graffiti he sees in the public toilets and the realization that men go there for sex with each other opens up a previously undreamt-of realm: the existence of a gay subculture.
Dave accepts his sexual orientation from the beginning; he never questions his desires or feels conflicted about them. However, he is not open about it to others at first since attitudes toward being gay in the 1960s are not tolerant; casual anti-gay bias pervades Dave’s world as men call each other antigay slurs as insults. Dave holds back from revealing his sexuality to others; he would sooner be thought of as different because of his racial heritage than because of his sexuality. When he does openly state his sexual orientation, it is to his mother and Esme, who are completely supportive since they are in a same-gender relationship themselves. Dave finds wider acceptance at Oxford and when he joins the theater company Terra, which he describes as “a free space for gays and lesbians” (486). The intersection between his race and sexual orientation comes to the fore when he and Hector are refused a room at a bed and breakfast in Devon; neither man is clear about whether racism or antigay bigotry is responsible.
Dave sometimes wonders whether his gayness is apparent, though he has trouble identifying other gay men. For example, Dave believes that Giles Hadlow bullies him partially because he can sense this aspect of Dave. When Dave develops feelings for Mr. Hudson at Bampton, he cannot tell whether Mr. Hudson is gay, but some of the boys, including Giles, think he is, and Giles refers to Mr. Hudson as a “ponce” (24), an insulting slang term for gay people that was common in the 1960s and 1970s. There are other boys at the school, like Andrew Cousins and Ken Wynans, who come out as gay much earlier in life than he does, but Dave does not see an affinity with them. When he falls in love with Nick at Oxford, it takes Dave a long time to realize that Nick does not have same-gender sexual desires.
The novel contrasts discovering one’s sexuality in youth with realizing it in adulthood. Juxtaposed with Dave’s understanding of himself is the experience of his mother, Avril, who faces harassment for being a single mother, for having a child of multiple races, and later of being in a lesbian relationship with Esme. She is often snubbed by neighbors, and the boys at Bampton are predictably cruel. Dave “sense[s] Mum ha[s] a notion of schoolboy taunts, difficult for [him], and awkward too for her, when she c[omes] to Speech Day, or to see [him] in a play” (183). Yet Dave feels “honor-bound to defend her against rumors [he is] certain [a]re true” (183).
Avril’s relationship with Esme also has serious consequences for family harmony. Her brother, Brian, is furious when he finds out and cuts her off from the family, though Dave’s experience of never having to go to Brian’s for Christmas appears to be a net positive. Nevertheless, people in Foxleigh look askance at the lesbian couple; after Avril’s death, Dave visits the town and thinks that he may sense in the old butcher Frank Fletcher an “unease” still about Avril and Esme’s relationship (438). Avril, however, takes no notice of such things. She puts her energies and affections into her small family of Esme and Dave and finds happiness with Esme, giving Dave a model of long-term relationship stability. The novel suggests that being true to one’s own nature—living one’s authentic self—is key.
The Ease of Falling in Love
Late in Dave’s life, when his friend Edie inquires about the book he is writing, Dave replies that he “wants to write about falling in love” (447). Thus, the experience of falling in love—something Dave does often and quickly—becomes a theme in Our Evenings. Dave’s propensity for falling in love shows his openness, vulnerability, and yearning for intensity in personal relationships.
Dave shows his facility for feeling intense emotions toward someone he barely knows as an adolescent. When he turns 14, he forms a brief, one-sided attachment to 19-year-old Italian waiter Marco. So excited is Dave that he thinks he can tell when Marco is present in a room without looking: “The pitch of his voice, glancing light of his accent on English words, wove itself through the air, and the air itself had the shimmer of his presence” (107). Dave’s refined idealism colors his thoughts about the young Italian man: “I wanted to be with Marco, that was all, to be the friend of someone so beautiful” (125).
As Dave slowly learns over the course of his life, while the intensity of heady love at first sight is pleasurably all-consuming, knowing little about the men he loves does not translate into long-term relationships. In love, Dave wears his heart on his sleeve and therefore is easily hurt and feels disappointment keenly. At Oxford, Dave again falls in love with someone he has only just met. Within a few hours of meeting fellow student Nick at a party, Dave is “running ahead unstoppably fast on the motor of falling in love” (220). Dave fantasizes about Nick every night to the point of obsession: “I wanted everything about him” (247). Only gradually does Dave realize that Nick is straight—he could have discerned this earlier without the obscuring lens of romance. Three years later, Dave meets Chris Canvey, and the sexual attraction is immediate. Dave finds him “irresistible” (285); it is love again, in which chemistry masks incompatibility. The relationship lasts for two years, until the arrival of Hector Bishop, with whom Dave falls in love while rehearsing a scene from a play. After that, he is wrapped up, mind and body, in the thrill of newly found love. When Hector appears at a party, Dave swoons: “[T]he whole room with its real and its would-be dramas was remote for ten seconds as if I was about to faint” (331).
In contrast to these dramatic instances of near-instant falling in love, Dave’s most important romantic relationship begins many years later when he is 60 years old. Although after meeting Richard, Dave—as he has a habit of doing—lives an imagined affair in his head until they can meet again, his partnership with Richard is stable and mature; the two men grow to know each other as people rather than simply objects of attraction, enjoying mutual respect and understanding. Falling in love becomes the gateway to lasting satisfaction as Dave finds a safe home with another man.
Racism and Prejudice
Dave, who has a Burmese father and a white mother, has dark skin, which makes growing up in the overwhelmingly white England of the 1950s and 1960s challenging. Although immigration of people of color was taking place at an increasing pace, Dave often experiences being marginalized, either through benign prejudice, as people in the small town of Foxleigh wonder at a white single mother of a boy of multiple heritage, or through more overt racism. Giles Hadlow, for example, calls him a “wog” (373), a racial slur common in England in the 1960s. Additionally, when Dave is hitchhiking home after Field Day, a motorist stops to shout at him, “Go back to wherever the hell you came from” (163).
Dave often finds himself having to explain his existence to others. People react with surprise when they notice him. When he is on vacation with his mother and Esme in Devon and Avril introduces him to the waiter Terence, Terence’s head jerks back, and “his shock [i]s disguised in a quick-thinking silence of four or five seconds, as he stare[s] out of the window” (105). Sometimes the reaction of another person is more disturbing, as when an old lady who passes Avril and Dave as they are taking a walk slights them both, refusing to return Dave’s smile or acknowledge Avril’s greeting.
However, these hostile external influences are matched in part by the loving, but equally harmful, coping strategy adopted by Avril. Her refusal to talk about the few years she spent in Burma and the child that resulted from her brief liaison with a Burmese man makes Dave’s father’s heritage an unspoken mystery; Dave internalizes that there is something taboo about it and grows up with a sense of being different.
Through Dave, the reader sees how racism plays out in the specific world of the theater. Dave has a talent for acting, but when he is a boy, the actress Elise Pleynet warns him that he will find it difficult to be cast as anything other than villains or minor roles “because of how people see [him]” (47). Pursuing an acting career, Dave is dogged by the feeling that people are prejudiced and remains conscious of his “appearance [and] difference” (249). In his progressive theater company Terra, race is not an issue; however, the financial success of Terra—which struggles, unlike more traditional theatrical institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company—is dependent not on ticket sales but on the largesse of Mark Hadlow.
More overt racism is apparent in the case of the Black actor Hector Bishop. At a party, when a woman gives him her coat to hang up, erroneously believing that he is hired help, Hector, understandably, is furious at the insult. When Dave tries to commiserate that similar things have happened to him, Hector replies, “David, you’re not even black” (355); Dave’s attempts to connect with his boyfriend’s experiences of racism seem like false equivalence. Hector has self-confidence and ambition, which Dave regards as “exemplary, but pitiful too, since no one in the big world that he dream[s] of [i]s going to offer him more than the mauvais rôles (341). This is confirmed when the Royal Shakespeare Company casts Hector in a small role but then fires him solely because “it look[s] pretty daft having one black person in Elsinore” (360). (Elsinore is the setting for Hamlet.) In the end, Hector achieves actorly fame—but he has to leave England for Hollywood to find success.
Dave spends most of his life downplaying the effects of the racism he faces. However, as the culture around him changes to become less tolerant of bigotry, Dave finds it easier to open up about his experiences. When he is in his early sixties, Dave is interviewed on television, and he describes the transformation: “I think we’ve seen a large deep change in attitudes across the country. The next generation will look back with disbelief at the racial prejudice we grew up with” (485). There is a terrible irony in these words because just 10 years later, in an atmosphere of fear and racial hatred surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, Dave is murdered by a man simply for looking Asian—a horrifying act of racism that dwarfs anything that happened before in the long stretch of Dave’s life.
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