Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Ruby Jones and it's time for you
Speaker 1: to sit back, relax and enjoy another episode of Read This,
Speaker 1: Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast. It's hosted as always by
Speaker 1: the editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, and features conversations
Speaker 1: with some of the most talented writers from Australia and
Speaker 1: around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear
Speaker 1: from Booker Prize winning author Alan Hollinghurst, whose latest novel
Speaker 1: is called Our Evenings. As always, I'm joined by Michael
Speaker 1: to tell me a little more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Him, Michael Ruby Jones. I love the idea of sitting
Speaker 2: back and relaxing to read this. I want people tense,
Speaker 2: on the edge of their seats, anxious what book talk
Speaker 2: is going on this week and how will I handle it?
Speaker 1: So, Michael, Alan Hollinghurst has been described by The Guardian
Speaker 1: as one of the great writers of our time. However,
Speaker 1: I have to admit that I'm not terribly familiar with
Speaker 1: his work, so tell me a bit about his career.
Speaker 2: He's one of those writers about whom you can honestly
Speaker 2: use the word beloved. The people who have read him
Speaker 2: adore him and kind of obsessively wait for a new
Speaker 2: book by him each time. He was probably best known
Speaker 2: for his book, a prize winning book, The Line of Beauty.
Speaker 2: His book before that, The Swimming Pool Library, was a
Speaker 2: kind of modern classic of queer writing and was hugely
Speaker 2: popular in some circles. But it really was with the
Speaker 2: Line of Beauty that he broke out to the mainstream.
Speaker 2: And as a consequence, the people who love what he
Speaker 2: does are absolutely in the tank for it, and I
Speaker 2: count myself amongst them.
Speaker 1: And so his latest novel is called Our Evenings Tell
Speaker 1: Me About the Themes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, In many ways it is classic Hollinghurst, all the
Speaker 2: kind of themes that he's known for, about memory and regret,
Speaker 2: about passion both repressed and expressed, about the artistic life,
Speaker 2: and what it is to kind of move through the
Speaker 2: different strata of British society. But this time around he
Speaker 2: has an arrator, a guy called Dave Wynn who's half Burmese,
Speaker 2: and he's kind of grappling with outsider themes in a
Speaker 2: different way to the way Hollinghurst has written about it
Speaker 2: in the past. Race is very much an element, but
Speaker 2: as our questions of performance, Dave's an actor and so
Speaker 2: we get a kind of beautiful insight into that world
Speaker 2: as well. It's very Hollinghurst, but he's pushing himself in
Speaker 2: exciting ways.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment an evening with Alan Hollinghurst.
Speaker 2: I thought I might start with something I remember from
Speaker 2: when we last spoke, actually, but I've seen it pop
Speaker 2: up in a few interviews with you about this book,
Speaker 2: which is I'm going to begin at the end and
Speaker 2: at your sense of kind of fatigue and relief that
Speaker 2: it's over, and you once again banning around the terrible
Speaker 2: idea that you might not want to write another novel
Speaker 2: after this.
Speaker 3: That was my overwhelming feeling when I finished it, But
Speaker 3: I think it was with the previous two certainly, and
Speaker 3: it just gets more intent each time. It seems to
Speaker 3: be more complicated and more exhausting.
Speaker 2: How so, is it less pleasurable the act of writing
Speaker 2: than it once was, or are you loaded up with
Speaker 2: more and more expectations for yourself at this point leave
Speaker 2: your career.
Speaker 3: I suppose there is that element of wanting to do
Speaker 3: something new. I think it's also something to do with
Speaker 3: getting older, and that one of the results of that
Speaker 3: for me has been writing these books. Which travel back
Speaker 3: over large periods of time. This one covers sixty years
Speaker 3: or more. On the previous two books even more than that,
Speaker 3: So the essential novelist question of selection becomes very intense.
Speaker 3: What out of this new book, Our Evenings is in
Speaker 3: the form of a memoir of someone looking back in
Speaker 3: his late sixties over his life. What is he going
Speaker 3: to light on? What the episode is going to be?
Speaker 3: So it was really a question of kind of the
Speaker 3: design of the book that took me the longest. Once
Speaker 3: I actually get two or three people in a row
Speaker 3: and get them talking, I'm really happy. And that's the
Speaker 3: part of writing I love. My bigger worries were sort
Speaker 3: of structural.
Speaker 2: Is there for you a kind of discipline to working
Speaker 2: out the schematics before you dive into the people, the conversations,
Speaker 2: the terrible writers' festivals, you know, whatever it might be.
Speaker 3: I find it pretty scary to write without a plan
Speaker 3: of some sort. Yeah, So I've always been a believer
Speaker 3: in that, and I think some of my problems with
Speaker 3: this book were trying to loosen up that practice a
Speaker 3: bit and write in a more sort of spontaneous way.
Speaker 3: But actually it just got me into a lot of trouble,
Speaker 3: and unusually for me, because I'm such a slow and
Speaker 3: cautious writer, generally, I wrote a lot of material in
Speaker 3: this book which didn't make the final cut. I was
Speaker 3: chasing little narrative lines and opening up scenes, and again
Speaker 3: enjoying doing that, but then having to place up to
Speaker 3: the fact that these seems really distant belong in this book.
Speaker 3: So I tend to see the early part of the
Speaker 3: book pretty clearly. I can see key episodes that are
Speaker 3: going to occur later on, and almost certainly at the
Speaker 3: very end of the book, but all sorts of you know,
Speaker 3: the exciting thing is all the stuff you discover in
Speaker 3: the course of writing it.
Speaker 2: One of the products of the plan on this occasion,
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, the kind of central conceit of the
Speaker 2: book is that Dave wins recollections of his life. It's
Speaker 2: the writing of his memoir, it's his voice, and then
Speaker 2: that gives it a number of things structurally that I
Speaker 2: think make for the kind of singular power of this book.
Speaker 2: One of them is about pacing, about the kind of
Speaker 2: languorous pace of ancient memory as opposed to the ever
Speaker 2: quickening speed of life as it comes to where we're
Speaker 2: living it was that pace always embedded in the idea
Speaker 2: that you would luxuriate in thirteen year old Dave in
Speaker 2: a way that you couldn't afford to let yourself luxuryate
Speaker 2: in sixty year old Dave.
Speaker 3: That was part of the idea. Yes, I mean, the
Speaker 3: book's in two almost equal halves, and the first half
Speaker 3: is all about his education, really, and so I saw
Speaker 3: it as, yeah, the time of rich as he says
Speaker 3: himself at some point, conveniently at his age, all sorts
Speaker 3: of episodes from his past come back to him with amazing,
Speaker 3: unexpected fullness, whereas it's quite hard to remember what he
Speaker 3: did three weeks ago. And I think all of us,
Speaker 3: as we get older, have that experience of time speeding
Speaker 3: up in a terrifying way. So the first half of
Speaker 3: the book, you know, it moves pretty slowly, and I
Speaker 3: hope that it conveyed a sense of what it's like
Speaker 3: for a young person who is contained within the structures
Speaker 3: of education and life is divided into terms and school
Speaker 3: years and university terms and so. And of course this
Speaker 3: young person is growing inside and outside of changing it
Speaker 3: all kinds of ways, but everything seemed to take a
Speaker 3: lot longer. The sense of time is much more sort
Speaker 3: of extensive somehow when you're when you're young. The books
Speaker 3: that comes to big crisis in his life at the
Speaker 3: end of the first half, and then we rejoin in
Speaker 3: a year two later in the second half, and he
Speaker 3: is sort of cut loose from this reassuring structure. So
Speaker 3: I hope that the time scheme slightly disconcerts the reader,
Speaker 3: as in life you just don't know where you're going
Speaker 3: once you've left the educational system.
Speaker 2: It does disconcert, but it also, I mean, there's such
Speaker 2: a beautiful kind of inexorable quality to it, that sense
Speaker 2: that you are privy to a life but also privy
Speaker 2: to the act of remembering.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the great surprises and delights in this book
Speaker 2: is at all times you play fair with the reader,
Speaker 2: but you don't always give them everything they need to
Speaker 2: know at any given time.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely right. Yes, that's an interesting aspect of writing
Speaker 3: in the first person. Of course, it's a different sort
Speaker 3: of mischief that a third person, the radar is doing.
Speaker 3: It FEUs withholding things that the memoirrist could tell you
Speaker 3: what he wants to with whold what he wants, and
Speaker 3: the way that the writing of writing the first person
Speaker 3: is an admission of the limits on your knowledge. A
Speaker 3: third person narrator was assumed to know everything about its character. Actually,
Speaker 3: I was very pleased to think that I didn't know
Speaker 3: everything about Dave and he didn't know everything about himself.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I was going to say, it's by
Speaker 2: my reckoning, it must be thirty years since you last
Speaker 2: wrote a book entirely in the first person, that's right.
Speaker 2: And I'm curious. I remember reading you're talking about how
Speaker 2: liberating the third person had been, how much you suddenly
Speaker 2: were able to stretch, and you're able to do things
Speaker 2: and have asides and be wry and not be as
Speaker 2: credulous as your narrator, and all of that stuff to plan.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious about the homecoming to the first person.
Speaker 2: As you say, from what I understand, part of it
Speaker 2: is about recognizing the limits of how much you can
Speaker 2: get into Dave's head.
Speaker 3: That is it, Bartley? Yes, And I think it was
Speaker 3: integral to the whole question of writing for the point
Speaker 3: of view of a mixed race narrator. I'd wanted for
Speaker 3: some time to sort of try and write something from
Speaker 3: a different racial point of view. Again, I felt if
Speaker 3: I was going to do that in the third person.
Speaker 3: It would introduce all sorts of awkwardnesses of me apparently
Speaker 3: knowing all about this person who is like me in
Speaker 3: some respects but has very crucial difference of being half
Speaker 3: Burmese and so being, you know, something of an anomalous
Speaker 3: figure in many of the worlds that he moves through.
Speaker 3: So I liked the merely partial knowledge, the modesty, if
Speaker 3: you like, of writing it for the inside, which it
Speaker 3: seems slightly paradoxical in a way, but it seemed to
Speaker 3: be the more tactful and in the end more interesting
Speaker 3: way of doing it.
Speaker 2: That paradox and that tact I love the idea of
Speaker 2: it as an act of text, like you're giving him
Speaker 2: his space as he requires it. But it does seem
Speaker 2: fascinating to me that for many years, and I think
Speaker 2: you're a writer who's long written very well and very
Speaker 2: interestingly about race, but the desire to write from the
Speaker 2: perspective of a protagonist with a different racial makeup to
Speaker 2: your own. I love that you held off on that
Speaker 2: until the moment when it was the most culturally charged
Speaker 2: it could be and the most fraud exercise. That seems
Speaker 2: like a singular brand of.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, it became much more fraud during the years
Speaker 3: when I was planning and actually writing the book, and
Speaker 3: I was very exercised about all that. Of course. I
Speaker 3: mean my position has always been that it's part of
Speaker 3: the point of bigger immersionative writers that you can assume
Speaker 3: any viewpoint you like, but of course everything depends on
Speaker 3: how it's done in practice. But I felt potentially vulnerable
Speaker 3: on the question, and I think that's why I settled
Speaker 3: partly on the mix race thing, so that'll be the
Speaker 3: sort of element of of someone who is more or
Speaker 3: less like me, maybe more or less through the time
Speaker 3: that I'd lived. And also choosing this actually very unusual
Speaker 3: combination of the Dave who has a white English mother
Speaker 3: and a Burmese father whom he he never knows, and
Speaker 3: the Burmese culture is a very remote one which hasn't
Speaker 3: left much of an imprint in British life, since it
Speaker 3: would have been a very different matter to right side
Speaker 3: from the point of view of the sort of second
Speaker 3: generation Jamaican immigrant or something of that kind, you know,
Speaker 3: who have a large cultural presence in Britain and a
Speaker 3: literature of their own and everything. But Burma was much
Speaker 3: much more marginal, but also has its kind of intrinsic
Speaker 3: interest because it's the end of the colonial period and
Speaker 3: Dave's mother met his father when she was working in
Speaker 3: Rangoon for the British governor just before the Burmese independence
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty seven, so it has those little resonances.
Speaker 3: But Dave, of course, he's very, very remote. He never
Speaker 3: actually goes to Burma.
Speaker 2: And part of that colonial story is one of silences.
Speaker 2: Dave's mother, for a range of reasons of her own
Speaker 2: and otherwise, is not exactly forthcoming with stories about his father,
Speaker 2: and so well, Dave has a kind of visual signifier
Speaker 2: of difference while he's a man of color in a
Speaker 2: part of Britain where it's relentlessly white. Beyond that, you know,
Speaker 2: what's inside is very much a product of his mother's upbringing.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's absolutely right. Yes, Now, the only family that
Speaker 3: we get to see his horrible uncle, his mother's brother.
Speaker 2: Uncle is a proper shit.
Speaker 3: He's a real shit. And you know, Dave's mother has,
Speaker 3: of course her own had quite interesting life. In the book,
Speaker 3: she's a courageous person. She's done this courageous thing of
Speaker 3: going off to the other side of the world not
Speaker 3: explained whim to get away. She returns to England pregnant.
Speaker 3: So she gives birth as a single mother to a
Speaker 3: brown faced child in this extremely conventional Berkshire country market town.
Speaker 3: So she's a person who's having to deal with all
Speaker 3: kinds of social stigma and potential ostracism and so forth.
Speaker 3: And Dave himself, therefore is brought up in this peculiar
Speaker 3: sort of world of partial acceptance. Averrol the mother, she
Speaker 3: becomes a dressmaker, and this also gives her this strangely
Speaker 3: intimate kind of access to various women in the town
Speaker 3: for whom she's making clothes. Actually that springs a whole
Speaker 3: new development in her life.
Speaker 2: Averril is one of my favorite characters I think in
Speaker 2: any of your books. So good the story is, her
Speaker 2: story is magnificent, and her relationship with Davis is so
Speaker 2: beautiful and so lovingly observed. And I don't want to
Speaker 2: give away the many singular pleasures in the book, but
Speaker 2: suffice it to say that she forms with Dave this
Speaker 2: kind of unlikely queer family in the time and place
Speaker 2: where they're coming together.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, there's probably not too much of a spoiler,
Speaker 3: as it's Okay, I think it's worth it. Yes, that
Speaker 3: one of her customers, a rather rather overwhelming woman called
Speaker 3: Lesby craft a rich divorce. He takes Dave fines. He's
Speaker 3: gone off to boarding school, so he doesn't have his
Speaker 3: his evenings with his mother any longer. And she's left
Speaker 3: alone and is obviously rather lonely. And he finds that
Speaker 3: in his absence, she's she's seeing more, more and more
Speaker 3: of this this this other woman, and slowly, without anything,
Speaker 3: as he was saying, she's she's not one for spelling
Speaker 3: things out. All that's slowly this completely new situation establishes itself. Yes,
Speaker 3: I like the idea, as you say, this little alternative
Speaker 3: queer family at the end of the first half of
Speaker 3: what would all sorts of things have gone wrong, they
Speaker 3: all eventually sort of come out to each other.
Speaker 2: Would I be writing saying that's the first coming out
Speaker 2: scene in one of your books. I was trying to
Speaker 2: I was skipping back through and I couldn't remember another
Speaker 2: coming out scene. And you know, for a writer who
Speaker 2: is I think rightly heralded as one of the great
Speaker 2: writers of the gay experience of the twentieth and twenty
Speaker 2: first century, you know, one of the absolute masters. It
Speaker 2: struck me that the coming out story is not one
Speaker 2: that you've returned too much.
Speaker 3: I've never done it at all before. No, I think
Speaker 3: it was just that thing of starting or presumption that
Speaker 3: one was at you know, it just didn't feature so yes,
Speaker 3: I wrote, I sort of shyly, and eventually myself got
Speaker 3: around to have anyone. There is this big atmosphere of
Speaker 3: the unspoken between David as well as we were saying.
Speaker 3: But it does mean that for the horrible, the horrible
Speaker 3: uncle that I scene seems to have, you know, let
Speaker 3: the family down badly twice, not only in a single
Speaker 3: brother of a brown faced child, but also being a
Speaker 3: larst bit. Except so they are officially excommunicated from the
Speaker 3: horrible family and very happily form their own little family.
Speaker 2: When we return, Ellen reveals why he didn't want to
Speaker 2: write a Brexit novel, but why this might be the
Speaker 2: closest he comes to writing his own memoir. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. It strikes me not just on the character
Speaker 2: of the uncle, but you know, in particular Giles, but
Speaker 2: other figures in this book. It strikes me reading through
Speaker 2: your Evra, one of the things I know about you
Speaker 2: is Ellen Hollinghurst is a man who despises a bully.
Speaker 2: That a bully might be your most loathed character.
Speaker 3: Is that fair? I just running by my back over
Speaker 3: earlier things. Yes, I do hate bully. God knows we've
Speaker 3: got cause enough to hate them. Yes, Dave's quite call
Speaker 3: him his nemesis, but his sort of polar opposite for
Speaker 3: the beauty of the book is Giles Hadlow. He wins
Speaker 3: a scholarship to this little public school, boarding school, a
Speaker 3: scholarship which is given by a family called had Those.
Speaker 3: Giles is their son, considerably less clever than than Dave.
Speaker 3: And yes, the bully someone who very much resents and
Speaker 3: despises Dave. Yes, so it's not the kind of intimate
Speaker 3: picture of the bully, but it's in need. There's something
Speaker 3: I think unsolvably mysterious about why he's a bully. You know,
Speaker 3: he's born to wealth, he has charming, delightful as parents.
Speaker 3: But he just rebels from very early on against all
Speaker 3: that sort of stop them in inflexible way. And we
Speaker 3: never really get a glimpse of Giles's in their life.
Speaker 3: He's just this kind of obstacle which keeps cropping up
Speaker 3: in Dave's path, and he forgets about it for years
Speaker 3: on end, and then at some crucial moment he will
Speaker 3: pop up again. And in the latter part of the
Speaker 3: book it becomes a very sort of right wing Euroskeptic
Speaker 3: Tory MP who's very instrumental in the disastrous Brexit vote
Speaker 3: and so forth. So in a sense, Giles actually wins. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the annoying thing, unfortunately.
Speaker 2: I think if the world's teaching us anything, it's that,
Speaker 2: of course Giles wins. Giles wins again and again and again, absolutely,
Speaker 2: but perhaps wins without being able to penetrate the kind
Speaker 2: of the relationships of love or integrity or you know.
Speaker 2: Giles is, in the context of the book, largely, as
Speaker 2: you say, an obstacle, but also irrelevant to the life
Speaker 2: that Dave builds for himself, and that seems kind of important.
Speaker 3: I think that's right. Yeah, So the book is really,
Speaker 3: of course, all about Dave's in a life and his
Speaker 3: understanding of life, and not about Giles's. Dave becomes an actor,
Speaker 3: and clearly quite a good one, though he can't reach
Speaker 3: his full potential in his earlier adult life because of
Speaker 3: his his skin color. So he his travels around around
Speaker 3: Shaffle Alternative Theater Company.
Speaker 2: Quite a good actor, but also very keen just to
Speaker 2: get his kit off whenever he gets a chance. You know,
Speaker 2: that seems to be a motivating factor.
Speaker 3: Well, the company that he joins is which gets a
Speaker 3: certain amount of scandalous attention by having a good deal
Speaker 3: of nudity in it, and it's I had quite a
Speaker 3: lot of fun with that little tactic.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is crucial that of having written so
Speaker 2: well about literature and about visual arts and fine arts,
Speaker 2: it makes sense that this time around the art in
Speaker 2: question had to be about performance. It had to be
Speaker 2: about artiverse that it had to be about how you
Speaker 2: present in the world, both as a creative act but
Speaker 2: also as an active survival.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And I didn't want
Speaker 3: to write another book about it writer, but it seems
Speaker 3: to be. It will be quite interesting meeting Dave as
Speaker 3: a young teenager adapting to a new media. He discovers
Speaker 3: he has this gift for mimicry, and he's clever, and
Speaker 3: he can learn complicated speeches and so forth. And I
Speaker 3: saw acting as being a way that he adapts to
Speaker 3: his environment, becomes different things for different purposes, and different
Speaker 3: situations and something for which he has a real, real gift,
Speaker 3: which will be his way of escaping, I suppose, from
Speaker 3: the world which it had seemed to confine him. In
Speaker 3: the first half of the book.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Brexit, and I think you know it's one
Speaker 2: element of this novel. I know that you are very
Speaker 2: keen not to write a Brexit novel, so I'm not
Speaker 2: going to insult you by saying that you have. But
Speaker 2: it seems to me that in the context of this book,
Speaker 2: which is so much about memory, about nostalgia, about acceptance,
Speaker 2: and about ideas of what the country you live in is,
Speaker 2: all of that feeds very powerfully, I think, into a
Speaker 2: kind of backdrop to a Britain that ultimately decides it
Speaker 2: wants to leave Europe. Was that always in the kind
Speaker 2: of DNA of this book or was that something that
Speaker 2: became clearer as it took shape and as the arc
Speaker 2: of Dave's life became clear.
Speaker 3: No, it was very much from the start, actually, and
Speaker 3: as you said, I really didn't want to write something
Speaker 3: which grindingly went through all the stages of Brexit. There's
Speaker 3: a chronological arc of the book from the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: when Britain was making its first attempts to join the
Speaker 3: EU to the end of the book just after the
Speaker 3: disastrous referendum result in twenty sixteen, so that gave it
Speaker 3: a sort of temporal framework, if you like. But I'm
Speaker 3: pleased to what you say about those larger ideas about
Speaker 3: country belonging, landscape and so forth. And they were very
Speaker 3: much part of my design from the beginning, and I
Speaker 3: hoped that, yes, they would take on a certain weight
Speaker 3: and resonance and interest through the book without it being
Speaker 3: sort of a labored political analysis of what was going
Speaker 3: on in kind of Euroskeptic thought and so forth. Some
Speaker 3: reviewers of indignant Brexiteers have said, having done justice to
Speaker 3: the full range, and they were a history of Euroskeptic
Speaker 3: thought on the right, and that's so much not my intention.
Speaker 2: Are you incredibly sad not to have a positive Good
Speaker 2: Reads review from Nigel Farage?
Speaker 3: What a loss?
Speaker 2: What a burden that must be on you. I hope
Speaker 2: you can sleep at that. How much in the space
Speaker 2: of your seven books, in the space of your career
Speaker 2: do you feel the environment for writing queer characters and
Speaker 2: queer love stories. How much has that changed that Milieure.
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, well, it has changed enormously as hardly anybody
Speaker 3: was doing it really when I started out. I think
Speaker 3: there was a great appetite for it then, and I
Speaker 3: think that appetite has persisted. But of course the subject
Speaker 3: itself has changed and developed, starting with what happened actually
Speaker 3: whilst I was writing that first book, which was the
Speaker 3: eruption of the AIDS crisis, which transformed the scape and
Speaker 3: generated its own literature. As you know, I've tended to
Speaker 3: like looking back and dropping in on episodes in the
Speaker 3: past in British gay history, but always had I've always
Speaker 3: had a sort of present day element, but that present
Speaker 3: day is constantly moving forward. The gay novel as a
Speaker 3: sort of genre, which was sort of really blossoming through
Speaker 3: the eighties and nineties, now seems to be a slightly
Speaker 3: sort of historic thing and borne out of a particular
Speaker 3: time of emergency and novelty political moment. The political questions
Speaker 3: now have probably changed, and the sense of sexuality is
Speaker 3: now much more complex. People are interested in sort of
Speaker 3: exploring sexuality rather than defining it. I feel, so it
Speaker 3: feels to me a much more borderless sort of subject.
Speaker 2: Is that exciting as a novelist.
Speaker 3: I think it is.
Speaker 2: Yes, your mother, if I understand correctly, died before you
Speaker 2: started writing this book.
Speaker 3: Yes, she did. She died when I was just in
Speaker 3: the last phases of writing the previous one. Yes, in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: The book is dedicated to her.
Speaker 3: I believe it is. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it again not to I certainly don't want to
Speaker 2: spoil something which is deliciously ambiguous and has multiple meanings
Speaker 2: when it comes to the possessive pronoun in the title.
Speaker 2: But the evenings in question of note are those shared
Speaker 2: between Dave and his mother, really, aren't they?
Speaker 3: They are the sort of primary meaning I suppose yes,
Speaker 3: And I love the phrase because it's so proves quite
Speaker 3: elastic and recurs at various points throughout the narrative and
Speaker 3: the different shades of meaning. But yes, I think that
Speaker 3: they are fundamentally yes, that secure home relationship between the
Speaker 3: boy and this public.
Speaker 2: Part of what you reflect on is the ways in
Speaker 2: which the loss of a parent has this kind of unmooring,
Speaker 2: ungrounding effect. That to be an outsider, to be someone
Speaker 2: who's struggling to work out a question and belonging, as
Speaker 2: is the case for so many of your characters, but
Speaker 2: you know, Dave I embodies are not just at a
Speaker 2: level of his sexuality, of his class, but also of
Speaker 2: his race. The loss of a parent being an ultimate
Speaker 2: act and a loss of place as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, that was something which very much struck me personally.
Speaker 3: After my mother died. I was an only child. We'd
Speaker 3: lived in Lochstershire for most of my life. That had
Speaker 3: been my sort of home landscape, and it was to
Speaker 3: me a kind of unanticipated dimension of bereavement that I
Speaker 3: lost not only my mother, who was ninety seven and
Speaker 3: had had a good, long life, but I also lost
Speaker 3: something enormous which was geographical, but with it something larger
Speaker 3: and more indescribable about the sense of place and belonging somewhere.
Speaker 3: And when I sold her house and sort of drove
Speaker 3: back to London for the last time, I just just
Speaker 3: had this whole sense of the landscape of my earlier
Speaker 3: life being closed off to me. Obviously, I could jump
Speaker 3: in the car again and go back there today if
Speaker 3: I wanted to, but that's not quite the point it was.
Speaker 3: It was a much larger sort of sense of dispossession,
Speaker 3: if you like, from my earlier life.
Speaker 2: I'm curious about whether you have ever contemplied a writing
Speaker 2: memoir yourself, whether you keep a diary, whether you you
Speaker 2: know whether you honest childhood memories for the process of
Speaker 2: writing this book, or whether that's a very separate part
Speaker 2: of your brain and your process.
Speaker 3: I think this is as close to memoir as I'm
Speaker 3: likely to get. Really, I did in writing this book.
Speaker 3: I did five areas of my own adolescence in particular
Speaker 3: time at Oxford suddenly opening up to me, and so
Speaker 3: there was a big infusion of memoir, not in so
Speaker 3: much precise narrative of detail, but in the kind of
Speaker 3: vacation of a world, in the state of mind that
Speaker 3: I was in at a particular time. I think I've
Speaker 3: always felt a slight problem in writing anything non fictional
Speaker 3: in the first person. I'm just not very good at it.
Speaker 3: It sounds potentious, but not quite knowing who I am
Speaker 3: or what the persona is that I'm putting before the public.
Speaker 3: And if I make a joke, will they understand it
Speaker 3: or will they think I'm, you know, just being a twap.
Speaker 3: So in a way, the mask of the fictional character
Speaker 3: is for me that the closest I think that I
Speaker 3: can can get to it and it's a way of
Speaker 3: talking about personal things without actually sort of directly presenting
Speaker 3: myself to the public.
Speaker 2: Alan Hollinghurst's beautiful seventh novel, Our Evenings, is available at
Speaker 2: all Good bookstores.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This next week, we'll be sharing Michael's conversation
Speaker 1: with writer LEC Blaine, who shares the incredible story of
Speaker 1: his family in his new memoir Australian Gospel. As always,
Speaker 1: if you want to dive further into Read this, you
Speaker 1: can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There
Speaker 1: are more than seventy episodes in the archive for you
Speaker 1: to enjoy. See you next week.