Tag: evenings and weekends

Evenings and Weekends is a novel mostly spanning a weekend in London and Basildon, as an interconnected group of characters across two generations face up to the messiness of life. Maggie is pregnant and on the cusp of moving back to Basildon from London, but she doesn’t want to leave, and her boyfriend Ed seems distracted. Her best friend Phil is falling for his housemate Keith, but Keith’s in another relationship and Phil doesn’t want to upset the current balance. Phil’s mum Rosaleen has a cancer diagnosis she wants to share with her son, but doesn’t know how, and Phil’s brother is soon to get married, but keeps disappearing. And there’s a whale stuck in the Thames.

This is the kind of kaleidoscopic literary fiction novel in which there’s not a huge amount of plot, but there is a lot of character moments of crisis and change, and you can get deep into the world of the interconnected characters. At first, it seemed that the “normal” life of Maggie and Ed wasn’t very interesting, but then it became apparent how much of an act this was. Other characters, particularly Phil and Rosaleen, have engrossing narratives around being haunted by their past and looking towards who they are now and how they relate to other people. There’s a lot of supporting characters too, who sometimes get a POV moment, and though this often doesn’t work in books, in Evenings and Weekends it did feel like it added colour to the tapestry, so to speak.

I liked how there was a lot about queerness underpinning the novel, and various characters’ relationships with queerness, particularly in a London millennial way, but also relating to class and growing up. The messiness of the characters’ lives felt very real and their complex experiences of love and sex brought a lot to the book, particularly by the ending. It was refreshing to have a novel explore some of these realities, alongside a great sense of London atmosphere, and the title is reflected in the way that the book is all about the times outside of work, the human moments, rather than another novel about millennials hating their jobs.

The ‘whale stuck in the Thames and a marine biologist who looks like Princess Diana’ subplot was a great element, but I did wish that it felt like it had an actual conclusion or connected with the characters by the end. Weirdly for a literary fiction novel without much plot, I feel like it could have a sequel, which explores further the characters’ decisions, maybe with a time jump to make them older and have different experiences.

Evenings and Weekends is a novel about not wanting to give up who you could be, that potential for excitement and fun and love, and it is also an exploration of London and small-towns, and the complexities of what futures you could have as a queer person. The range of points of view through the narrative will be divisive, but I didn’t lose track of how anyone was and enjoyed the little insights you got from a sudden change to a supporting characters’ POV.