Familiar scenarios: Our Evenings, by Alan Hollinghurst, reviewed

There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and riddled with suburban self-consciousness – a kind of complicated awareness of his non-posh failings and resulting subtle superiority. He meets another young man – possibly gay – who is posh. An intricate dance ensues of social slip-ups and huge townhouses in Notting Hill, bags of money and country piles. It’s a formula which can be transposed between Edwardian drawing rooms and 1980s parties with only the slightest changes. Sometimes our protagonist is the aristocrat himself; sometimes he even went to Cambridge. He’s always cultured – interested in poetry, theatre and Henry James.

Hollinghurst’s fiction was, for a period, radical. His Man Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (2004) exposed the hypocrisy among the political classes who tolerated homosexuality only when it went unmentioned, and turned a blind eye to the Aids crisis. In other works, from The Swimming Pool Library to The Stranger’s Child, there’s a reverence for historical homosexual relationships: the love and sex which must have taken place beyond the bounds of most records.

Our Evenings does nothing new. The plot is one of tedious familiarity. Dave Win is the son of a single mother, Avril, in an undistinguished ‘market town in the middle of nowhere’. The recipient of a scholarship, he goes to a local public school and eventually meets the Hadlows, the family who pay his fees. The parents, Mark and Cara, are ‘left-wing plutocrats’ and kind with their money; their son Giles, at school with Dave, is a tyrant.

The plot jerks on at intervals dictated by relationships, from the (occasionally sexual) bullying inflicted by Giles and crushes on teachers, through to adolescent freedoms at Oxford, followed by the London theatre scene. Dave becomes an actor, and much of the book describes experimental performances in a small travelling troupe, or his later semi-fame on screen.