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Key moments in an actor’s life over seven decades are illuminated with skill and quiet power in this languid and stately novel There’s an Alice Munro story, Train, which leaps through decades, as if the logic of time works quite differently in the world of her tale. Munro was a master of time, allowing us to linger on moments, objects and landscapes, and then to jump forward, asking the reader to fill in the blank spaces. Alan Hollinghurst does something like this in Our Evenings, a stately, elegiac novel that seems to turn upon a symbolic sundial in the garden of a characteristically Hollinghurstian country house. On the dial is a line from Cicero: “SESEM SINE SENSU” (without noticing, we grow old).Our Evenings is the story of Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese actor born in the late 1940s. The novel unfolds across seven decades, moving from the 1960s to the pandemic, tracing the quiet, formative moments of Dave’s life with unhurried grace. There is an unmistakable sense that Hollinghurst, now 70 and in the foothills of old age himself, has mellowed, his once sharp prose softened into something more languid and reflective. Continue reading...