Author interview: ‘Gay life and history keeps on developing and changing’

The world of LGBTQ+ fiction is a completely different proposition now, and is flourishing thanks in no small part to writers such as Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst’s debut novel ‘The Swimming Pool Library’, published in 1988, was described as ‘the best book on gay life yet written by an English author’. The reviews for his latest offering, ‘Our Evenings’, have been just as glowing. Picture: Lucy North/ PA

• Our Evenings
• Alan Hollinghurst
• Picador, €18.99

Alan Hollinghurst is recovering from a nasty bug and is still a little under the weather when he chats to me from his home in London.

“I will do my best to sound intelligent,” he says. 

The British author has been garlanded with some of the most prestigious literary awards throughout his career, and is considered by many to be one of the great writers of our time. 

The reviews for his most recent novel, Our Evenings, the story of a gay Anglo-Burmese actor and his life across seven decades, have been glowing.

As a former deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement himself, does he pay attention to the critical response to his work?

“Occasionally, I am warned by a kind friend or a publicist to skip a review,” he says.

“And I do because there is no point, you end up arguing in your head with this person you don’t know and it doesn’t do you any good.”

But generally I do read them and bringing out a book so rarely, I feel quite interested in how it is going to fare when it goes out into the world.

Hollinghurst’s debut novel The Swimming Pool Library, published in 1988, was described by writer Edmund White as “the best book on gay life yet written by an English author”.

Hollinghurst went on to be named one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 1993. 

However, it was his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, which really catapulted his work into the literary mainstream when it won the Booker Prize in 2004.

It was an engrossing evocation of Thatcher’s Britain, seen through the eyes of gay narrator Nick Guest — an outsider who is drawn into British high society.

From today’s vantage point, it is hard to imagine the fuss that surrounded the win; Hollinghurst chuckles about the newspaper headline that screamed, “Gay sex wins Booker”. A great deal has changed in those two decades.

“Yes,” says Hollinghurst. “A lot was happening already and gay fiction as a phenomenon really took on salience through the later ’80s and ’90s.

“But it hadn’t broken into the echelons of Booker Prize shortlists and so on until that point, rather amazingly.

“I had been writing from a gay point of view for quite a while, so it did all seem rather like old hat to me.”

It was an inevitable journalistic talking point about the whole thing and it didn’t do any harm.

The world of LGBTQ+ fiction is a completely different proposition now, and is flourishing thanks in no small part to writers such as Hollinghurst.

“The interesting thing of taking gay life and gay history as your subject is that it is a live subject, it keeps on developing and changing in ways that you couldn’t have anticipated. 

“Back in the ’80s, it was all far more binary, gay, or straight. Now we are in a much more complex terrain of not so much defining as exploring sexuality.

“I love the sense that the whole thing has grown and become more complex and subtle,” he says.

There are echoes of the political themes in The Line of Beauty to be found in Our Evenings, which takes in the rise of populism and Brexit although Hollinghurst is at pains to point out that is not the book’s main concern — “It is not, thank God, a Brexit novel”.

Does he feel that what is happening in politics today is too fantastical to be portrayed realistically?

“The extreme acceleration in America, you couldn’t keep up with it. My tendency has been not to write out of the immediate political moment,” he says. 

“ The Line of Beauty is set in the mid-’80s but it came out in 2004. Both the political moment of the Thatcher boom years and the extended moment of the Aids crisis, I had to let it settle before I saw how to deal with it.”

The new book does take on the slightly more immediate thing of Brexit and that kind of nationalism.

“I address it fairly obliquely through the experience of somebody who is not in that world politically but on whom inevitably it impinges.

“There are writers who are up to the challenge of writing things that are more topical. I don’t think that’s generally in my nature.”

The book is certainly elegiac in tone, with the protagonist Dave Win looking back on his youth in a very different Britain. Hollinghurst says it was “awful” to watch Brexit unfolding.

“I am furious, incredulous, and very sad. I think it was an absolutely disastrous decision,” he says. 

“We were led astray by implausible politicians. Nothing good whatsoever has come out of it.”

Not unlike the character of Dave Win, who is an actor, Hollinghurst, aged 71, has been honing his craft across six decades now. In some ways, writing has become a more challenging process.

“I started writing in my early teens, I wrote appalling poems,” he says. 

“The disconcerting thing about being a lifelong novelist is that I first imagined you worked out how to do it and after that it got easier and easier.”

But I have found the reverse has been true. Each one is harder than the one before.

“There was a sort of ease and pleasure about writing my first book when I had a full-time job.

“I was writing it in the evenings and at weekends, and no-one knew anything about it, it was just this lovely thing that I was doing.

“I have never quite recaptured that sense of happiness in writing.”

Of course, there are many more distractions now — although he is not really on social media, the online world still encroaches.

“When I was finishing Our Evenings and finding it a struggle, I went back 30 years, and I had the thing of having no phone or contact with the internet until 6pm,” he says. 

“It was completely magical — you just take possession of your day again and you know you cannot be interrupted. 

“It was like when I was writing in the ’80s and I would just unplug the telephone in the morning. I do recommend it, it is absolutely wonderful.”

Although it is slightly hellish when you go back on at six o’clock and you have 153 emails.

He acknowledges that he has been fortunate to be able to ply his trade as a full-time writer for most of his career: 

“I was lucky my first two novels both did very well. With sales of literary fiction going down, it is getting harder and harder. You really need another job.

“I am aware of the more perilous position of literary fiction and the problems of getting people to read anything longer than 140 words.

“It has become more cutthroat, the bid for public attention, and probably harder for new literary novelists to get established.”

Hollinghurst has been enjoying some book-related travel, including a visit to the West Cork Literary Festival next week. 

Cork is a place he knows relatively well, having spent time in Skibbereen, and with his friend, the poet Bernard O’Donoghue, at his home place in Cullen. 

He is refreshingly forthright when I ask him if he is working on a book at the moment.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I am having a lovely time not writing anything. I usually feel quite emptied out when I get to publishing a book and it takes a year or two for the tank to refill.

“I’m far from starting anything else and I am very much enjoying not having that pressure.

“After a while I shall miss it and I shall long to be back in that other mysterious place messing around.”

• Alan Hollinghurst will be in conversation with Sue Leonard on Friday, July 11, at 8.30pm, The Maritime Hotel, Bantry, as part of the West Cork Literary Festival which takes place from July 11 to July 18;
• www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie.