In Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, Our Evenings, his narrator Dave Wynn, remembers a piece of music played in his childhood by a music teacher. It's also called Our Evenings, and it is by Czech composer Leosh Yanichek. The book takes the form of a memoir as Dave reflects on a life lived, and throughout it the notion of evenings returns. He writes of evenings spent in the company of lovers, of friends, of the evening as a particular time he spent with
his mother. He reflects on the fact that for an actor, the profession he's given his life to, one's evenings are rarely one's own. He thinks about a quote on the side of a sum in a garden where he spent time words from Cicero sinsim sinne censu, part of a longer phrase that loosely translates as gradually, imperceptibly we grow older. Our Evenings is Alan Hollinghurst's seventh novel. He won the book a prize back in two thousand and four for
the line of Beauty. His books include The Swimming Pool Library, The Stranger's Child and the Spa Shalt Affair. He's a writer of rare grace and power, and he's very much on form with this new one. Hollinghurst fans will be thrilled, and for those of you who have never read.
Him, you're welcome. What a treat you have in.
Store, Unlichael Williams, And this is read This a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. I thought I might start with something I remember from when we last spoke, actually, but I've seen it pop up in a few interviews with you about this book, which is I'm going to begin at the end and at your sense of kind of fatigue and relief that it's over, and you once again banning around the terrible idea that you might not want to write another novel after this.
That was my overwhelming feeling when I finished it, But I think it was with the previous two certainly. And it just gets more intense each time. Yes, it seems to be more complicated and more exhausting.
How so is it less pleasurable the act of writing than it once was? Or are you loaded up with more and more expectations for yourself at this point of view career?
I suppose there is that element of I want you to do something new. I think it's also something to do with getting older, and that one of the results of that for me has been writing these books which travel back over large periods of time. This one covers sixty years or more. On the previous two books even more than that. So the essential novelist question of selection becomes very intense. What out of this new book, Our Evenings is in the form of a memoir of someone
looking back in his late sixties over his life. What is he going to light on? What the episode is going to be? So it was really a question of kind of the design of the book that took me the longest. Once I actually get two or three people in a row and get them talking, I'm really happy.
And that's the part of writing. I love. My bigger worries were sort of structural.
Is there for you a kind of discipline to working out the schematics before you dive into the people, the conversations, the terrible writers' festivals, you know, whatever it might be.
I find it pretty scary to write without a plan of some sort. Yeah, So I've always been a believer in that, and I think some of my problems with this book were trying to loosen up that practice a bit and write in a more sort of spontaneous way, but actually it just got me into a lot of trouble, and unusually for me, because I'm such a slow and cautious writer, generally, I wrote a lot of material in
this book which didn't make the final cut. I was chasing little narrative lines and opening up scenes and again enjoying doing that, but then having to place up to the fact that these scenes really just didn't belong in
this book. So I tend to see the early part of the book pretty clearly, and I can see key episodes that are going to occur later on, and almost certainly the very end of the book, but all sorts of you know, the exciting thing is all the stuff you discover in the course of writing it.
One of the products of the plan on this occasion, as you mentioned, the kind of central conceit of the book, is that Dave wins recollections of his life, it's the writing of his memoir, it's his voice, and then then gives it a number of things struck that I think make for the kind of singular power of this book, one of them is about pacing, about the kind of languorous pace of ancient memory as opposed to the ever quickening speed of life as it comes to where we're living.
It was that pace always embedded in the idea that you would luxuriate in thirteen year old Dave in a way that you couldn't afford to let yourself luxury ad in sixty year old Dave.
That was part of the idea. Yes, I mean, the book's in two almost equal halves, and the first half is all about his education, really, and so I saw it as the time of rich As he says himself at some point conveniently at his age, all sorts of episodes from his past come back to him with amazing, unexpected fullness, whereas it's quite hard to remember what he did three weeks ago. I think all of us, as we get older, have that experience of time speeding up
in a terrifying way. So the first half of the book it moves pretty slowly, and I hope that it conveyed a sense of what it's like for a young person who is contained within the structures of education and life is divided into terms and school years and university terms and so, and of course this young person is growing inside and outside of changing it all kinds of ways,
but everything seems to take a lot longer. The sense of time is much more sort of extensive somehow when you're when you're young and the books that comes to big crisis in his life at the end of the first half, and then we rejoin him a year or two later in the second half, and he is.
Sort of cut loose from this.
This reassuring structure, so I hope that they have The time scheme slightly disconcerts the reader, as in life you just don't know where you're getting once you've left the educational system.
It does disconcert, but it also, I mean, there's such a beautiful kind of inexorable quality to it. That's sense that you are privy to a life but also privy to the act of remembering.
You know.
One of the great surprises and delights in this book is at all times you play fair with the reader, but you don't always give them everything they need to know at any given time.
That's absolutely right.
Yes, that's an interesting aspect of writing in the first person. Of course, it's a different sort of mischief that a third person narrator is doing a fears withholding things, but the memoirrist can tell you what he wants to hold what he wants, And the way that the writing of writing in the first person is an admission of the limits on your knowledge. A third person narrator is assumed
to know everything about its character. Actually, I was very pleased to think that I didn't know everything about Dave and he didn't know everything about himself.
Well, I mean, I was going to say, it's by my reckoning, it must be thirty years since you last wrote a book entirely in the first person.
That's right.
I'm curious. I remember reading you're talking about how liberating the third person had been, how much you suddenly were able to stretch, and you're able to do things and have asides and be wry and not be as credulous as your narrator, and all of that stuff to plan. So I'm curious about the homecoming to the first person. As you say, from what I understand, part of it is about recognizing the limits of how much you can get into Dave's head.
That is it, Bartley, Yes, And I think it was integral to the whole question of writing for the point of view of a mixed race narrator. I'd wanted for some time to sort of try and write something from
a different racial point of view. Again, I felt if I was going to do that in the third person, it would introduce all sorts of awkwardnesses of me apparently knowing all about this person who is like me in some respects but has very crucial difference of big half Burmese and so being you know, something of an anomalous figure in many of the worlds that he moves through.
So I liked the merely partial knowledge, the modesty if you like, of writing it for the inside, which it seems slightly paradoxical in a way, but it seemed to be the more tactful and in the end more interesting way of doing it.
That paradox and that that tact. I love the idea of it as an act of tact, like you're giving him his space as he requires it. But it does seem fascinating to me that for many years, and I think you're a writer who's long written very well and very interestingly about race, but that desire to write from the perspective of a protagonist with a different racial makeup to your own. I love that you held off on that until the moment when it was the most culturally
charged it could be and the most fraud exercise. That seems like a singular brand of masochism.
Yes, well, it became much more fraut during the years when I was planning and actually writing the book, and I was very exercised about all that.
Of course.
I mean my position has always been that it's part of the point of bigger being an immerginative writers that you can pursue any viewpoint you like, But of course everything depends on how it's done in practice. But I felt potentially vulnerable on the question, and I think that's why I settled partly on the mixed race thing, so that will be this sort of element of someone who is more or less like me, maybe more or less
through the time that I'd lived. And also choosing this actually very unusual combination of the Dave who has a white English brother and a Burmese father whom he never knows, and the Burmese culture is a very remote one which
hasn't left much of an imprint in British life. Since it would have been a very different matter to write side from the point of view of a sort of second generation Jamaican immigrant something of that kind, you know, who have a large cultural presence in Britain and a literature of their own and everything.
But Burber was much much more marginal.
But also has its kind of intrinsic interest because it's the end of the colonial period and Dave's mother met his father when she was working in Roungoon for the British governor just before the Burmese independence in nineteen forty seven, So it has those little resonances. But Dave, of course, he's very, very remote, and he never actually goes to Burma.
And part of that colonial story is one of silences. Dave's mother, for a range of reasons of her own and otherwise, is not exactly forthcoming with stories about his father. And so while Dave has a kind of visual signifier of difference, while he's a man of color in a part of Britain where it's relentlessly white, beyond that, you know, what's inside is very much a product of his mother's upbringing.
Yes, that's absolutely right. Yes, Now, the only family that we get to see his horrible uncle, his mother's.
Brother uncle is a proper shit.
He is a real shites.
And you know Dave's mother has, of course her own had quite interesting life in the book. She's a courageous person. She's done this courageous thing of going off to the other side of the world explained whim to get away. She returns to England pregnant, so she gives birth as a single mother to a brown faced child in this extremely conventional Berkshire country market town. So she's a person who's having to deal with all kinds of social stigma
and potential ostracism and so forth. And Dave himself, therefore is brought up in this peculiar sort of world marshal acceptance.
Averill the mother, she.
Becomes a dressmaker, and this also gives her this strangely intimate kind of access to various women in the town for whom she's making clothes. Actually that springs a whole new development in her life.
Averil is one of my favorite characters. I think in any of your books. Story is her story is magnificent, and her relationship with Dave is so beautiful and so lovingly observed, And I don't want to give away the many singular pleasures in the book, but suffice it to say that she forms with Dave this kind of unlikely queer family in the time and place where they're coming together.
Yes, I mean it's probably not too much of a spoiler, as it's.
Octa, I think it's worth it.
Yes, that one of her customers, a rather rather overwhelming woman called Leslie Croft, a rich divorce takes. Dave finds he's gone off to boarding school, so he doesn't have his his evenings with his mother any longt and she's left alone and is obviously rather lonely, and he finds that in his absence, she's seeing more and more of this other woman, and slowly, without anything, as he was saying, she was not one for spelling things out. All that's
slowly this completely new situation establishes itself. Yes, I like the idea, as you say, of this little alternative queer family. At the end of the first half of what would all sorts of things have gone wrong, they all eventually sort of come out to each other.
Would I be right in saying that's the first coming out scene in one of your books. I was trying to I was skipping back through and I couldn't remember another coming out scene. And you know, for a writer who is I think rightly heralded as one of the great writers of the gay experience of the twentieth and twenty first century, you know, one of the absolute masters. Truck me that the coming out story is not one that you've returned too much.
I've never done it at all before. No, I think it was just that thing of starting or presumption that one was at you know, it just it just didn't feature. So yes, I wrote, I sort of shyly, and eventually
myself got around to have anyone. There is this this big atmosphere of the unspoken between David and his mother, as we were saying, but it does mean that for the horrible, the horrible uncle that Ape seems to have, you know, let the family down badly twice, not only in big a single brother of a brown faced child, but also being a lusbian. So they are officially excommunicated from from the horrible family and very happily formed their own little family.
When we return, Ellen reveals why he didn't want to write a Brexit novel, but why this might be the closest he comes to writing his own memoir. We'll be right back it strikes me, not just on the character of the uncle, but you know, in particular Giles, but other figures in this book. It strikes me reading through your Evra. One of the things I know about you is Allan Hollinghurst is a man who despises a bully. That a bully might be your most loathed character.
Is that fair? I just running back over earlier things. Yes, I do hate bully. God knows we've got cause enough to hate. Yes, Dave's quite call him as never says, But his sort of polar opposite for the beauty of the book is Giles Hadlow. He wins a scholarship to this little public school, boarding school, a scholarship which is given by a family called had Those Giles is their son, considerably less clever than than Dave. And yes, a bully,
someone who very much resents and despises Dave. Yes, so it's not the kind of intimate picture of a bully, but it's in need. There's something I think unsolvably mysterious about why he's a bully. You know, he's born to wealth, he has charming, delightful, generous parents, but he just rebels from very early on against all that in a sort of stubborn and inflexible way, and we never really get
a glimpse of Giles's in their life. You know, He's just this kind of obstacle which keeps cropping up in Dave's path, and he forgets about it for years on end, and then at some crucial moment he will pop up again, and in the latter part of the book it becomes a very right wing Euroskeptic Tory MP who's very instrumental in the disastrous Brexit vote and so forth. So in a sense, Giles actually wins. That's the Yeah, that's the annoying thing.
Unfortunately. I think if the world's teaching us anything, it's that, of course, Giles wins. Giles wins again and again and again. Absolutely, but perhaps wins without being able to penetrate the kind of the relationships of love or integrity or you know. Giles is, in the context of the book, largely, as you say, an obstacle, but also irrelevant to the life that Dave builds for himself, and that seems kind of important.
I think that's right.
Yeah, So the book is really, of course all about Dave's in a life and his understanding of life and not not about Giles's. Dave becomes an actor, and clearly quite a good one, though he can't reach his full potential in his earlier adult life because of his skin color, so his travels around with Round Shackle Alternative Theater Company.
Quite a good actor, but also very keen just to get his kit off whenever it gets a chance. You know, that seems to be a motivating factor.
Well, the company that he joins is which gets a certain amount of schedualous attention bout having a good deal of nudity in it, and it's I had quite a lot of fun with that little tactic company.
I mean it is crucial that of having written so well about literature and about visual arts and fine arts, it makes sense that this time around the art in question had to be about performance. It had to be about artiverse, and it had to be about how you present in the world, both as a creative act but also as an active survival.
Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I didn't want to write another book about it, writer, but it seems to be. It will be quite interesting meeting Dave as a young teenager adapting to a new media. He discovers he has this gift her mimicry, and he's clever, and he can
learn complicated speeches and so forth. And I saw acting as being a way that he adapts to his environment, that he's becomes different things for different purposes and different situations, and something before which he has a real, real gift, which will sort of be his way of escaping, I suppose, from the world which he had seemed to confine him in the first half of the book.
You mentioned Brixit, and I think you know it's one element of this novel. I know that you are very keen not to write a Brixit novel, so I'm not going to insult you by saying that you have. But it seems to me that in the context of this book, which is so much about memory, about nostalgia, about acceptance, and about ideas of what the country you live in is, all of that feeds very powerfully, I think, into a kind of backdrop to a Britain that ultimately decides at
once to leave Europe. Was that always in the kind of DNA of this book, or was that something that became clearer as it took shape and as the arc of Dave's life became clear.
No, it was very much from the start actually, and as you said, I really didn't want to write something which grindingly went through all the stages of brexit chronological arc of the book the early nineteen sixties, when Britain was making its first attempts to join the EU, to the end of the book just after the disastrous referendum result in twenty sixteen. So that gave it a sort
of temporal framework, if you like. But I'm pleased to what you say about those larger ideas about country belonging, landscape.
And so forth.
They were very much part of my design from the beginning, and I hoped that yes, they would take on a certain weight and resonance and interest through the book without it being sort of a labored political analysis of what was going on intell youroskeptic thought and so forth. Some reviewers have indignant Brexiteers have said, having done justice to the full range, and they were a history of auroskeptic thought on the right, and that's so much not my intention.
Are you incredibly sad not to have a positive Good Reads review from Nigel Farage?
What a loss?
What a burden that must be on you? I hope you can sleep at that. How much in the space of your seven books, in the space of your career, do you feel the environment for writing queer characters and queer love stories, how much is changed that Millieau?
Oh gosh, well, it has changed enormously, as hardly anybody was doing it really when I started out. I think there was a great appetite for it then, and I think that appetite has persisted. But of course the subject itself has changed and developed, starting with what happened actually whilst I was writing that first book, which was the eruption of the AIDS crisis, which transformed the landscape and
generated its own literature. As you know, I've tended to like looking back and dropping in on episodes in the past in British gay history, but always had I've always had a sort of present day element of that present day is constantly moving forward. The gay novel as a sort of genre, which was sort of really blossoming through the eighties and nineties, now seems to be a slightly sort of historic thing and born out to a particular
time of emergency and novelty political moment. The political questions now have probably changed and the sense of sexuality is now much more complex. People are interested in exploring sexuality rather than defining it. I feel so it feels to me a much more borderless sort of subject.
Is that exciting as a novelist?
I think it is.
Yes, Your mother, if I understand correctly, died before you started writing this book.
Yes, she did.
She died when I was just in the last phases of writing the previous one.
Yes, in twenty sixteen.
The book is dedicated to her.
I believe it is.
Yes, Yeah, it again not to I certainly don't want to spoil something which is deliciously ambiguous and has multiple meanings when it comes to the possessive pronoun in the title. But the evenings in question of note ah, those shed between Dave and his mother really aren't they.
They are the sort of primary meaning I suppose, yes, And I love the phrase because it's so. It proves quite elastic and recurs at various points throughout the narrative and the different shades of meaning. But yes, I think that they are fundamentally Yes, that that secure home relationship between the boy and this mother.
Part of what you reflect on is the ways in which the loss of a parent has this kind of unmooring, ungrounding effect that to be to be an outsider, to be someone who's struggling to work out a question and belonging, as is the case for so many of your characters. But you know, Dave I embodies are not just at a level of his sexuality, of his class, but also of his race, the loss of a parent being an ultimate act and a loss of place as well.
Yes, that was something which very much struck me personally after my mother died. I was an only child. We'd
lived in Loocestershire for most of my life. That had been my sort of home landscape, and it was to me a kind of unanticipated dimension of bereavement that I lost not only my mother, who was ninety seven and had had a good, long life, but I also lost something enormous which was geographical, but with it something larger and more indescribable about the sense of place and belonging somewhere.
And when I sold her house and sort of drove back to London for the last time, I just just had this whole sense of the landscape of my earlier life being closed off to me. Obviously, I could jump in the car again and go back there today if I wanted to. But that's not quite the point. It was a much larger sort of sense of dispossession, if you like, from my earlier life.
I'm curious about whether you have ever contemplied in writing memoir yourself, whether you keep a diary, whether you know, whether you honest childhood memories for the process of writing this book, or whether that's a very separate part of your brain and your process.
I think this is as close to memoir as I'm likely to get. Really, I did in writing this book. I did find areas of my own adolescence in particular time at Oxford suddenly opening up, And so there was a big infusion of memoir, not in so much precise narrative of detail, but in the kind of vacation of a world, in the state of mind that I was in at a particular time. I think I've always felt a slight problem in writing anything non fictional in the
first person. I'm just not very good at it. It sounds pretentious, but not quite knowing who I am or what the persona is that I'm putting before the public. And if I make a joke, will they understand it or will they think I'm, you know, just being a twap.
So in a way, the.
Mask of the fictional character is for me that the closest I think that I can can get to it. And it's a way of talking about personal things without actually sort of directly presenting myself to the public.
Alan Hollinghurst's beautiful seventh novel, Our Evenings, is available at all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, and one of my great traits is always to reading new Michelle Dee creates a book and her latest Theory and Practice, is no exception. I'm actually going to talk to her about it early next year. She will be the first
read this guest to get a repeat visit. Last time she was on, she's talking about her love of Shirley Hazard, and we're going to have her on in the show early in the new year to talk about Theory and Practice. A book that is part essay, part memoir maybe, but all fiction. It's wonderful. You can find it and all the others were mentioned today at your favorite in the ben and bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, Please tell your friends and rate and
review us. It helps a lot. And next week I'm read this no grab to play because we're heading back to Fitzropaul to see what people are reading on a hot, hot summer's day. The forecast is over forty degrees and I look forward to being very awkward asking people if they want to be on a podcast. Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support
of AR Group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolman Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.