Our Evenings

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 6

Part 1, Chapters 7-12

Part 1, Chapters 13-18

Part 2, Chapters 19-24

Part 2, Chapters 25-30

Part 2, Chapter 31-Coda

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

“Our Evenings”

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The phrase “our evenings,” as well as being the title of the novel, is a recurring motif. It is first mentioned when Dave sits in Mr. Hudson’s study at Bampton as they listen to Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s collection of pieces for piano titled On an Overgrown Park. The first piece is titled “Our Evenings,” which Dave describes as a “magic little movement” (176). The phrase recurs when Dave is an undergraduate at Oxford; he is at a party with his friends, and they are reciting the poem “Spelt From Troubled Leaves” by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which contains the lines, “Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us” (203), and contains many vivid images of evening.

The phrase also refers to Dave’s chosen profession, acting, which is pursued largely in the evenings. Dave describes both the good and the more challenging aspects of such a lifestyle. People visit actors backstage after the performance, which leads to camaraderie and long-term friendships—“the cheerful loyalty and nostalgia” (416)—but can be stifling. However, two such backstage visitors, a couple now in their eighties, Hettie Barnes and Lionel Wilshire, have been actors all their lives and do not mind the fact that “their evenings [a]re rarely their own” (417).

Most importantly, the phrase is the projected title of Dave’s memoirs, partly as a tribute to Richard. Dave and Richard use these words to describe stages of their relationship: “[T]he phrase was our term for the teasingly rationed three or four times a week we saw each other” (449). Dave acknowledges the difficulties of “being the partner of an actor, and being effectively partnerless night after night” (449). When Dave is rehearsing for a new play, he feels that Richard regrets “the loss of [their] evenings—that [Dave] would be laughing and shouting and swigging brown water with strangers on stage when [he] might have been home chopping parsley and sipping a lovely unmooring Negroni with [Richard]” (449-50). They do, however, seem to overcome such difficulties and have a happy life together, and thus the phrase “our evenings” acquires an affectionate glow.

Finally, “our evenings” also carries the connotation of the sunset of a person’s life. Dave finds himself reflecting on old age and also on death as Esme and then his mother pass away.

Nudity and the Male Body

The theme of gay desire is underlined by the recurring motif of male nudity and the allure of the male body. This is apparent early in the novel. When Dave is still in his mid-teens, he admires on the beach in Devon “the nearly naked boys and men […] glimpses keen and keepable as snapshots” (108); he is also acutely aware of the physicality of the waiter Marco, catching “the quick closeness of his sweat, the curve of his thigh as he turn[s] away to the next task” (112). Later, Dave is excited by the brief glimpses of flesh that he sees when observing the schoolmaster Mr. Hudson as he referees a rugby match. On one occasion, Mr. Hudson pulls off his jersey, giving Dave a “glimpse for five meaningless indelible seconds of his white lower back and grey waistband of his jock-strap” (178).

Nudity also emerges as a symbol of liberation during Dave’s acting career. On-stage nudity signals the experimental and transgressive nature of the acting company Terra. When Dave plays Edgar in King Lear, director Ray Fairfield tells him to strip completely (as the text requires) when the character disguises himself as a beggar. Dave is pleased with the way he does the scene, noting that “it [i]s a relief and in fact rather more than that to the secret exhibitionist in [him]” (293). Remarking on the company’s interest in nudity, Derry Blundell, the old actor whom Dave visits, remarks, “[W]e could never have had all that bare flesh on stage in my day” (315), making clear how much this aspect of the performance is about changing attitudes toward sexuality, the human body, and freedom.

Nudity in the novel is often equated with beauty. Hector Bishop, for whom Dave has almost overwhelming desire, works as a nude model for a life-drawing class. Dave has the thought that Mr. Trivet, who runs the class, had “stared at Hec’s naked body for hours at a time, much longer than [Dave] ever had,” and that he “must know Hec’s body best of all, because (as [Dave] picture[s] it) he paced around the circle, examined the chest and the thighs and the cock and balls from each student’s angle” (343).

Finally, nudity also points to an aspect of Dave’s character: his penchant for exhibitionism. When Dave plays a Cambodian soldier and there is a brief nude scene, Richard teases him, “Well, you like getting your kit off” (449). Dave denies it facetiously, saying that he “just happen[ed] to have been directed by a series of perverts who liked the look of [him] naked in one play, and thought they’d try it in the next” (449). At the end of the novel, following Dave’s death, Richard finds in Dave’s records a clip of an old TV episode in which Dave is undressing on a beach. Richard regards this as confirmation that directors and Dave both liked such scenes: “You can see he enjoys it; there’s something almost indecent about it, which no one at the time admits they’ve registered” (484).

The Burmese Treasures

The “Burmese treasures” is the name that Dave gives to the few items his mother owns from her time in Burma. These items symbolize the cultural heritage that Dave knows so little about, which leaves a gap in his understanding of himself and where he comes from. They therefore have a powerful influence on him. One item is the “Burma box” (443), a teak sewing box that his mother uses for her work as a dressmaker. When it is opened, it gives off a “sharp far-off odour,” which he thinks of as “air from Burma stored and never fading” (70). Two black elephants are inlaid on the lid, and Dave remembers his mother saying that she had once seen 20 elephants being washed in a river, with a boy sitting on each one behind its ears. Dave “long[s] to see that [him]self, and to be one of the boys” (70).

Another Burmese treasure is the longyi, a traditional hip wrap, and a six-foot long head wrap called a gaung-baung, which his mother wears on special occasions. A couple of times, Dave’s mother puts the gaung-baung on him, and as he sits at the dressing table, he is “in love with this beautiful self, like a brother, in the mirror” (70). The subject of Burma comes up only rarely, though, in Dave’s family home; it is “an avoided subject” (112), so these mementos are one of the few ways that his mother communicates to him a small piece of his background. Once, however, at Christmas after Dave’s first term at Oxford, his mother dresses up unexpectedly in her red tartan longyi, with “the scarlet and gold-thread gaung-baung” (200). Looking at her dressed like that brings tears to Dave’s eyes, and he has the feeling, since Esme is also present, that “something too private for any of [them] really to understand [i]s being said for the first time in public” (200).

Another Burmese treasure is the one photograph of Dave’s father that his mother keeps in a frame in a drawer in her dressing table. As a boy, Dave takes the photograph out secretly when his mother is not at home and gazes at it. It symbolizes a familial heritage that he can never know in detail. He sees his father as “unknowable, but looking just a little like [him]” (78). He does not see the photograph again for 50 years, but it turns up after Avril’s death. The photograph “remains a puzzle” to Dave; “it could hardly be more personal or more remote” (443).