Our Evenings

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The phrase “our evenings,” as well as being the title of the novel, is a recurring motif. It is first mentioned when Dave sits in Mr. Hudson’s study at Bampton as they listen to Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s collection of pieces for piano titled On an Overgrown Park. The first piece is titled “Our Evenings,” which Dave describes as a “magic little movement” (176). The phrase recurs when Dave is an undergraduate at Oxford; he is at a party with his friends, and they are reciting the poem “Spelt From Troubled Leaves” by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which contains the lines, “Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us” (203), and contains many vivid images of evening.

The phrase also refers to Dave’s chosen profession, acting, which is pursued largely in the evenings. Dave describes both the good and the more challenging aspects of such a lifestyle. People visit actors backstage after the performance, which leads to camaraderie and long-term friendships—“the cheerful loyalty and nostalgia” (416)—but can be stifling. However, two such backstage visitors, a couple now in their eighties, Hettie Barnes and Lionel Wilshire, have been actors all their lives and do not mind the fact that “their evenings [a]re rarely their own” (417).