Our Evenings

One feature of Hollinghurst’s narrative style is on display in this section. Hollinghurst sometimes begins a chapter by jumping forward in time from the previous one without any indication of having done so. The new chapter simply presents a new situation, often with new characters, without an explanation of the time lapse. For example, Chapter 12 jumps forward two years from Chapter 11 but does not explicitly say so, so the reader must be alert and figure this out.

These chapters are part of the coming-of-age aspect of the narrative. As Dave matures, his talent for acting shows at Bampton. He acquires a reputation as a reader and impersonator of well-known fictional characters and actors, particularly P. G. Wodehouse’s famous character, the butler Jeeves from The Code of the Woosters. Dave regularly attracts an appreciative audience. Even Giles and Fash “Fascist” Harris, the widely disliked house captain, attend and are unable to stop laughing. Dave also finds a small bit of mentorship in Elise Hadlow, who praises his declamatory abilities and runs lines from several plays with him. While Elise warns that he will never be allowed to play Hamlet, Dave still gets a thrill from the impromptu acting session, which foreshadows the career he will later adopt. The novel’s allusions to classical works of theater like Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night show how limited Dave’s early acting opportunities will be at first, setting up a contrast between these experiences and his future in the more experimental Terra theater company.

Hollinghurst offers insight into the Racism and Prejudice that Dave faces and hints about his sexuality by using the accumulation of small details and allowing the reader to assemble them thematically. This narrative device is a common technique of the novel’s realist genre. For instance, Hollinghurst depicts how both antagonistic outsiders and those who love Dave communicate racial prejudice. Figures like Giles, Uncle Brian, the angry motorist, and the waiter at the beach resort insist on making Dave feel inferior or out of place because of his skin color: Giles refers to Dave and Manji with the slur “wogs” (143), and Dave catches sight of two boys “pulling slit-eyed faces” at him through a window (149). Similarly, Brian’s unspoken prejudice is fairly obvious: He never speaks to Dave directly.

However, the novel points out that the very loving Avril’s silence about her experiences in Burma and with Dave’s father also has a profound effect on Dave’s sense of himself. Avril faces her own frequent racist and sexist responses from outsiders, like the cold woman near Ansell’s Farm who disapproves of her being a single mother to a son of another race; Avril’s maladaptive response is to shut down conversation about Dave’s heritage almost entirely. In another example, even when Dave seeks out information about his background, he can only access books written by white colonists that feature racist stereotypes. At school, a library book, published in 1909, describes Burmese people as “a charming but lazy race” and as the “Irish of the East” (97), revealing the casual bigotry applied by the English in a variety of directions.

Given these inputs, Dave internalizes a sense of outsider-ness. On the beach and in the restaurant with his mother and Mrs. Esme Croft, he assumes that others are puzzled by this “foreign-looking” child who accompanies the two white women (108). He thinks that perhaps they think he is “a refugee […] an orphan being taken to the seaside for a special treat” (108). He cannot help but perceive himself through the eyes of bigoted observers, a perspective that others and isolates him.

Dave’s experience of Discovering and Accepting One’s Sexual Orientation also comprises several smaller moments that heighten the novel’s realism while exploring how a young teenager becomes aware of his gay desires in a culture that actively represses them. Again, Hollinghurst juxtaposes Dave’s internal understanding of his desires with his encounters of gay men and their lives. In his own mind, Dave is often aware of men’s bodies: His glance lingers on a brief exposure of male flesh when the shirt of one of the older boys at school rides up a little above his stomach. On the beach, he enjoys observing the nearly naked bodies of the men, and he is attracted to the waiter Marco.

These thoughts are developed through exposure to the ways that gay men find and connect with one another in the intolerant world around them. Dave overhearing two men talking on the party line telephone is his first exposure to gay people. He has a comical misunderstanding that marks his age: When one of the men, Jeffrey, uses the affectionate term “lovey” (80), to the other man, Dave thinks that this must be the other man’s last name. The graffiti and the anonymous observing eye in the public toilet open up a whole new secret world, as he imagines men meeting each other at the designated time to have sexual encounters.

At the same time, antigay prejudice is never far. Dave often hears slurs about gay people, which are casual and in commonplace use. On vacation in Devon, he overhears a man called Ollie call his friend Trevor a “poof”—a common antigay slur in 1960s England—but in a way that suggests that Trevor is not in fact gay and that it is Ollie who might be giving voice to a secret desire inflected with internalized anti-gay prejudice. Dave also hears Brian refer to Esme’s former husband Gilbert as a “fruit” (136), another term used in England at the time to refer to a gay man. The implication is that Gilbert and Esme had a marriage of convenience, intended to make them appear heterosexual to avoid stigma.