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.