This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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In the pantheon of the English novel, few releases are as high status or as eagerly awaited as a new Alan Hollinghurst. They don’t come along that often, after all: there have been just six novels since his groundbreaking debut The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988. That book was remarkable not just for bringing explicit gay sex into the polite drawing room of English literary fiction, but for its elegant, rarefied prose.

Four decades later Hollinghurst has rarely put a foot wrong: his 1998 novel The Spell is his only overall dud, whilst works of brilliance such as The Folding Star (1994) and The Sparsholt Affair (2017) have been overshadowed by his deserved Booker Prize win for the Henry James-channelling The Line of Beauty (2004).

Yet since The Line of Beauty there has been a sense that, because the books come along so seldom, each one must be an event, encompassing decades in the characters’ lives and great sweeps of social change. Whether the infrequency drives the scale, or the other way about, is hard to tell. And his new novel, Our Evenings, goes further still, covering most of its narrator’s life. William Boyd, effective copyright holder for the “whole life novel” in English, may well be envious, for Our Evenings exhibits all of Hollinghurst’s ability with language, character, empathy, observation and wit. 

Our narrator is Dave Win, an actor with a Burmese father and English mother, looking back on his life from “the thin social air of old age”. In the long opening stretches of the book, he is a teenager at the fee-paying Bampton school, where he’s an Exhibitioner or sponsored pupil, residing in the holidays with his sponsor family, the Hadlows, at their country retreat. 

Their son, Giles, is Dave’s contemporary, his school bully and a boy, according to his father, “with no sense of beauty”. (A harsher criticism in the Hollinghurst universe cannot be levelled.) Giles also creeps into Dave’s bedroom at night, only to be rebuffed, which may explain some of his hostility — but the holiday is made worthwhile for Dave by a transcendental experience with Hadlow aunt Elise, an actress whose kindness to him persuades him into the profession.

We move from here to Dave’s family life: his mother and her business partner and — subtly conveyed — lover Esme. Then to school, where he wins an essay prize, suffers racism and homophobia and ventures into both sex and acting. 

All through this, Hollinghurst shows his ability as a novelist of accumulation: the book is constructed from stretches of time in Dave’s life; these sections are made of shorter scenes; and the scenes are made from a multitude of precisely put observations (“the phone made a small buzzing click, like an instantly stifled urge to ring”) as well as dialogue. Just as, in The Folding Star, Hollinghurst made a scene of elegance from young men engaged in a pissing contest, here he extracts beauty from a page where a masturbating Dave finds himself being peeped upon in a public toilet.

Hollinghurst is always excellent on self-awareness: not just at school and “the shift of atmospheric pressure as you step into a master’s space”, but also “the freezing, nearly chemical sensation of going on stage”, and, when a driver picks up a hitch-hiking Dave and then begins flirting with him, how “I saw myself treading water above possibilities I only half understood”. He is good, too, on the chaos of love and even throws in amusing bit parts, more as diversion than vérité, for Joan Collins and Jeremy Paxman. 

If there’s weakness in Our Evenings — aside from the vagueness of the markers separating the phases of Dave’s life — it comes less in the text than in the expectations placed on it by advance chatter. The character of Giles is neither as prominent nor as dramatically horrible as billed. And despite talk that the book departs from Hollinghurst’s usual upper-middle milieu with Dave being the son of a single parent, this is not a gritty book: the precision and luxury of Hollinghurst’s observations have a cushioning effect, even on the racism and homophobia Dave faces.

The framing device that closes the book adds to the sense, evoked by the Remains of the Day echo of the title, of melancholy and life coming to a close — Hollinghurst marked his 70th birthday this year. Not for him though the thinning out of some late work: Our Evenings retains the amplitude of a master novelist at his best.

More prolific, though no less admired, is Jonathan Coe, whose serious comic novels, and comic serious novels, have been big news since his breakthrough What a Carve Up! three decades ago. His new book is — against stout competition — perhaps his best since then: intricate, energetic, entertaining.

One proof of the cleverness that Coe brings to his project is that its title — The Proof of My Innocence — has at least three separate meanings, incorporating literary shop-talk, unworldliness and “inner sense”. This is a book of multiple faces, a sort of literary mirrorball, which makes a unified story from three dominant novel genres — cosy crime, dark academia and autofiction. 

The story takes place over the 49 days of Liz Truss’ turbulent premiership in autumn 2022. As anyone who has read Coe’s more political fictions — a growing wedge of his output — will know, this period is unlikely to have been chosen as an admiring tribute. 

The central character is Phyl, a graduate who’s returning to her parents’ home and has the desire to write a book. Her flirting with the genres above (one cosy crime title that occurs to her is The Flapjack Poisonings) leads us to the three main sections of the novel, which focus on the murder of Christopher Swann, a political blogger and family friend of Phyl’s.

Coe doesn’t pursue the style of his sub-genres so much as simply fit the story into the theme. In the crime story, Christopher Swann attends a right-wing political conference (“Some of them are relatively harmless cranks. Some are out-and-out racists and sadists”) and, after clashing with several attendees, winds up dead. 

In the dark academia section, we read the memoir — evidence in the Swann murder case — of a dying man, Brian Collier, who was a student at Cambridge in the 1980s and witnessed in one professor’s salon some political manoeuvrings which draw a line directly from Thatcher to Truss. Finally we get the autofiction, which brings out former minor characters: the author Peter Cockerill and his greatest critic.

That all of this is a story within a story, and the outer shell only becomes clear at the end, which is apt enough for a book about how today we all seem to occupy different realities. It’s hard to convey the sheer brio with which Coe delivers his multi-layered story, one where cleverness is a virtue in itself but is never sterile or without purpose.

The Proof of My Innocence is a warning and a romp, at once angry and playful, which takes its jokes (including a good one about the word “bishopric”) as seriously as its themes. Coe can even splice Transport for London’s fatuous “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan with Truss’ resignation speech and make the results genuinely moving. The novel fits into no genre but its own. It’s pure Coe and all the better for it.

Not so much blending genres as bending them is Andrew Michael Hurley’s new book Barrowbeck. Hurley became a phenomenon a decade ago when his debut The Loney — first picked up by a tiny publisher — became a bestseller and prize-winner. Hurley specialises in weird fiction and Barrowbeck seamlessly brings together the mundane and the uncanny. 

But is it a novel at all or a collection of stories? It describes centuries in the life of a village in the north of England, from its founding in an unspecified era (“every village began with a single blow to a single tree”), through the 15th to 21st centuries and into the near future. A common thread is provided not by characters but by the persistent hum of strangeness that pervades Barrowbeck, a land where the natural and the supernatural are separated by a permeable membrane.

So we move from an ancient time when the community meant more than the individual, through a court case for murder which highlights the warring tribes of reason and superstition, to a man who experiences dreams believed to be visions from the future. Some stories have entirely grounded premises, such as a delicious jeu d’esprit where a man has himself buried at the end of the garden to make the house impossible for his estranged wife to sell. Others are entirely fanciful, such as the woman who grows babies in a vegetable patch, or a fair featuring miniature animals.

Hurley’s other blend is ideas and language, with plenty of both to chew on, from questions about the betrayal of rural communities to vividly expressed images: a shrapnel-struck soldier with his “appalling pocket of a face”; a girl who “[came] out of her mother twisted at the belly like a dishcloth”. Some stories, inevitably, are stronger than others, but what we’re reminded of is the eternal truth, whether with supernatural dimensions or not: there’s nowt so queer as folk.