Dave Win is the son of an English mother and a Burmese man who she met in mysterious circumstances in Burma.
We first encounter Dave at the age of 13 when he’s staying at the country house of the wealthy family who’ve sponsored his scholarship to boarding school.
The story follows Dave as his life unfolds through adolescence when he discovers he’s attracted to men and all the anguish of unrequited love that entails. He has a stint at Oxford and then an acting career in experimental theatre that takes him all over the country and, although never ascending to stardom, brings him the sense he’s doing what he does best. Inevitably, given Dave’s biracial identity, sexual orientation and class, British bigotry in all its overt and covert manifestations is an important theme and motivates some of the most compelling scenes. Underscoring all the rest and endowing the novel with an unsentimental tenderness is his steadfast bond with his mother, a deceptively strong, independent character, as masterfully crafted as the protagonist.
This is Hollinghurst’s seventh novel and shows him at the peak of his powers. His elegant (and eloquent) prose shines but this time in a way more reflective of mortality and life’s inescapable deceleration into ageing. More subtle and less blatantly gay than his previous work, it demonstrates a perceptibly deeper compassion for the foibles of his characters
Often funny, scenes are brilliantly observed and spiced with an incisive skewering of the pomposities and prejudices of the very British world he writes about, much in the way of his earlier Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty. This is a book with no suspense-packed plotlines, just the rare pleasure of brilliant prose, deeply human characters and the persuasive authenticity of life.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize.
He lives in London.
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