I will start with a spoiler alert – in talking about this book I will be talking about the plot…
The literary conceit of this work is that it is David Wan’s memoir, his telling of his story, which in the final pages after David’s death becomes the task of his partner. What does this add? Not much, for the largest part it reads as a standard novel.
There are some key facts in the story, David goes to a Public School on a bursary, and the power dynamic with the family that provided that bursary, despite their kindness to David, which is toxic. David is of mixed heritage and is othered because he is seen as “non-white”, but having been brought up in England by his English Mother, he doesn’t really have a connection to the thing that causes him to be othered. David is gay. David’s mother enters a long-term relationship with another women. The son of the family that provide the bursary, Giles, is the shadow to the story, a Brexit championing politician – he lurks on the sidelines of the story but has no real part to play. David becomes a successful actor. David dies as the result of a racial and homophobic assault – even in his final moments he is defined by his “otherness”.
I think I enjoyed it as a collection of short stories, as a whole it didn’t engage – Hollinghurst work has also had a strong social / political commentary – but the two other novels of his I have read were published some years before I read them, time creates a certain detachment from the situations and the commentary – while we are still living the post-Brexit post-COVID lives that Hollinghurst is commenting on here, and maybe there is a rawness about it all that is difficult.
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