By Owen Richardson
Race is at the centre of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel.
FICTION
Our Evenings
Alan Hollinghurst
Picador $34.99
In 1988, The Swimming-Pool Library was the debut that really turned heads. In the dark years of the AIDS crisis someone dared to publish a book that looked back to the summer of 1983, the halcyon days, celebrating the vagaries of desire from obsession and the pursuit to the fierce fleeting encounter. With desire, though, comes the control of desire, its policing, and politics were also there, not the politics of the plague but the historical oppression that preceded it.
Politics, and politicians, turned out to be one of the themes of Hollinghurst’s career. Hollinghurst has always sung the beauty of men, but he is not so keen on men in power. One of the turning points in The Swimming Pool Library was the revelation that the gay hero’s grandfather had led the crackdown in the 1950s that sent so many gay men to prison, or the grave; the Sparsholt affair in the novel of that title is a kind of queered Poulson scandal, combining rent boys and crooked property developers. And most memorably of all, there was Gerald Fedden, the Thatcherite MP of The Line of Beauty, charming and self-absorbed and ultimately brutal.
Racial politics have also played a part: from the very beginning, Hollinghurst’s cast list has included black characters, invariably as lovers, and he has always noted the different treatment they receive from white Britons. David Win, the hero and narrator of his new novel, has a black lover in his youth, but Hollinghurst puts race at the centre of the book: David has an English mother and a long-vanished Burmese father.
David launches out from his modest background when he is awarded a scholarship to the posh Bampton school, courtesy of the immensely rich and philanthropic Hadlows family. One of his schoolmates is the Hadlows’ son Giles, this novel’s Tory rotter, who it turns out is as unpleasant as his parents are beneficent: I wondered if Hollinghurst wanted his readers to think of Kenneth Clark, wealthy aesthete and art critic, presenter of TV series Civilisation, and his son Alan, one of the cartoon villains of the Thatcher years.
Giles’ unpleasantness features most heavily in the first 150 pages or so, more as suggestion and threat than as fully dramatised outrage, and thereafter it pops in occasionally as Giles ascends in the Conservative Party. One knows that Hollinghurst is saving something for later, his powers of misdirection and strategic coyness niftily and not too manipulatively employed.
Alan Hollinghurst writes with a combination of experience, observation, empathy and research.Credit: Getty Images
As Giles makes his way on the national stage, David has taken to the actual stage. He falls off the meritocratic ladder when he flunks his Oxford finals, but acting is there to catch him. Not that this isn’t a struggle, and even more so than the usual life of the young actor. David’s career begins in the 1970s, a time of radicalism in the theatre, but also well before the advent of colour-blind casting. “It will be difficult for you,” an older actress says, with the “pondering stare of someone needing to be frank as well as supportive ... Not because of your talent, but because of how people see you.”
The story is punctuated with aggressions, from the micro- to the macro- and megalo-, directed at David and at his boyfriend Hector. Some of these come from characters who are themselves stereotypes, like Uncle Brian, a suburban tyrant, literally your drunk uncle; some from apparently presentable people, like the famous actress at a party who mistakes Hector for the help.
The culminating xenophobia of Brexit and the anti-East Asian racism of the pandemic are the most recent inflammations of a perennial condition: the England of “No Blacks No Dogs No Irish” still exists, racism waxes and wanes but never goes away. (The anti-immigrant riots that have happened since Hollinghurst completed the novel reinforce the point. But if they hadn’t, something else would.)
David’s story proceeds in tandem with his mother’s. When David is a teenager, lusting after lads on the beach, reading the filthy messages on public toilet walls, his mother, Avril, is discovering her own sexuality, and how to make such a life in the provincial England of the 1970s. (Uncle Brian has something to say about that, too.) Avril and her friend Mrs Croft, later Esme, are the most fully realised women characters Hollinghurst has yet offered; he has come a long way from the boarding-school-gay-bar-boxing-gym milieu of his first book.
Hollinghurst with his novel The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker Prize.Credit: Reuters
It should be noted that Hollinghurst’s prose is as vivid and exact as ever, his youthful virtuosity long since broken in, and the narrative rhythms so smooth that this rather long book can be read with speed and ease; his evocation of the worlds through which David passes is the usual persuasive combination of experience, observation, empathy and what one assumes is research.
One thing the novel does lack, though, is curiosity about the country where David’s mother met his father. Being half-Burmese amounts to little more than his appearance, a longyi and a gaung-baung, some passing remarks about coups. And, to be crass about it, Who Do You Think You Are? seems not to have come calling, even though David becomes enough of a minor celebrity to be invited to boutique literary festivals.
“Perhaps once a decade I am taken by friends to an evening of Burmese dance, not just dance but opera … I don’t have the language, I can’t stand the hsaing-waing, I sit up and slump back in waves of desperate attention and half-insane boredom.” That is the point: the lack of curiosity is David’s. He isn’t Burmese; he is English, and has acquiesced entirely in his mother’s reticence about her early life.
It’s not that this is implausible, on the contrary. But what it also means is the novel’s main interest in David’s racial heritage is the bigotry it provokes. In other words, how it makes him a victim. As a gesture of solidarity with those who have to put up with racism, this is ambiguous, to say the least.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.