Evenings and Weekends by Oisin McKenna is a story of romance, community, and inescapable heat.
It follows multiple characters during the course of a heatwave in London, and uses the city’s sense of urgency and movement to place you directly within that landscape. The novel uncovers the web of individual lives exploding throughout the wider, collective chaos of the world, and the impossibility of finding a place of security. We witness Ed and Maggie’s struggling romance; Phil’s relationship fears; preparation for Callum’s wedding, and the family-wide effects of Rosaleen’s recent diagnosis. As their past seeps into their present, all find themselves mingling amongst the city landscape, waiting for their futures, and an end to the warmth. McKenna refuses to shy away from strikingly relevant topics of queer identity, grief, and economic struggle, allowing readers a glimpse into a seemingly ordinary snapshot of this generation of young adults Evenings and Weekends. And it left me feeling nostalgic for years I have not yet lived.
I had waited for a moment of solitude to begin the book, which I’d been carrying around for a while unopened. I wasn’t quite sure why. I think because I knew it was going to be something different, something nice, and nice things deserve to be read at the right time. There was a sense of emotional weight to the novel, the unashamedly human stories inside bringing a promising, precious feel. Like they were speaking words that ought to be preserved. As I began, a faint sound of construction was lingering on the air, which made me think of my dad; my own family was already on my mind before I’d even begun to explore somebody else’s. Those echoes of work also reminded me of the city the text revolved around, where the world seemed always to be growing. It was with that sound in my ears and that image in my eyes that I started to read.
The first sentence of Evenings and Weekends contained a whale. That was as far as I needed to read to know I would get through the rest pretty quickly. McKenna uses this obviously out-of-place creature of unimaginable size and beauty to encase the novel’s events. As the tale progresses, parallel to the actions of each character is the condition of the whale, and the news being run about it; the story of the whale becomes a frame within which the smaller narratives are living. It is a constant the characters can refer back to, reminding us of their place within the wider city, and giving an escape out of their own small journeys. It becomes a hauntingly sad, yet enjoyably random, backdrop to an otherwise ordinary weekend; perhaps exploring the idea that no weekend is truly ordinary. The whale also provides a sense of stability amongst the constantly shifting storylines, giving the reader a chance to breathe. For a moment we too can become part of the crowd, standing and staring silently with saddened awe. The slowly dying whale is representative of the climax building within the claustrophobic world each figure is hurtling through: everyone, in their own way, will be left stranded.
When I met Ed, I became almost as intrigued with him as I was the whale; I felt as though we breathed in time, our minds alike, only he’d managed to get someone to write it all down for him, and I could only follow in Oisin McKenna’s literary trail. When a character grips you with the intensity that Ed, and then Phil, and especially Rosaleen, does, it makes you desire to stay inside their world. Even as you watch that very world crumble around them, exposing that it’s maybe not such a nice place after all, you still long to be there.
Then, amongst the letters, emerged the heat, described so vividly that a wave of it hits you, and all the things you’ve ever felt in those burning city summers is laid out like a picture. You are invited to smell, and touch, and feel as the characters do, to breathe in the humidity they are choking on. Whilst I read, the real sun above me beat into my skin with slight hints of aggression, and the more the characters battled the warmth, the more I felt myself understanding their emotions. The unshakeable companion of summer is every memory you have ever stored in your mind, and that rang true in this text. As the characters reflected on their own lives, I too felt myself transported back to my Grandma’s garden, to late nights walking home, to watching my parent’s friends laughing in the glowing dark from my open bedroom window. I was simultaneously moved into McKenna’s world, and also into my own interpretation of the summer he described so clearly.
Primarily formed of long, languid descriptions that flow across multiple lines, McKenna’s writing is full of every possible word there is to say. There’s a relaxing feel that comes from sentences that seem to touch every item in every room, and tell you exactly what it feels like to be alive in that particular instance of time, before reaching their conclusion. Occasionally, you get lost along the way, stumbling breathlessly in the gaps between words, but you soon find yourself back in the swaying tide, rushing out to sea. Mckenna never fails to remind you why you bothered following the words in the first place either, piecing together backstories with the intricacy of putting shattered glass together; it’s clear that only pain awaits, but we keep going in the hopes we’ve been tricked. We never have.
Evenings and Weekends leaves you as empty as you are hopeful, if it is possible to feel both at once. A longing for life is paired delicately with a bitter anger towards what being alive really entails. The novel encourages you to root for its central relationships; however, by using the lens of an omniscient presence following each character, their private thoughts are exposed. So, as an outsider, it becomes increasingly apparent that things are falling to pieces. You end the novel distraught that what you knew to be true has indeed come to reality.
As a society that continually pines for connection, for somebody to look at us and tell us ‘I feel like that too’, Evenings and Weekends is reassuring in its representation of modern living. I began to wonder whether the desire for escapism that I had always felt so strongly was actually just hiding my true longing for realism; more comforting than a tale of events that will never happen, is a story of a day that looks just like your own. The exploration of the simultaneous community and isolation you can feel, especially when in the presence of such huge crowds, is done in perfect balance. Further insight into the struggles of women, the queer community, and young adults trying to find their place, serves to expand both the characters themselves, and the world in which we live. Politically and emotionally, the novel is a warning about the pain we put ourselves in, and the pain others force into our lives. How to keep going in a crumbling, modern landscape; that is what McKenna shows as both impossible, and perfectly achievable, if you only take each disaster as it comes. The day will always bring an evening, and the week, a weekend.
A few times, I became slightly lost as McKenna touched upon what felt like whole cities of characters, people who never appeared again, or had no satisfying conclusion. On reflection, however, my obsession was fuelled by forcing me to look into every window I passed, and discover another new life worth seeing. It also brought that sadness we all feel at the knowledge that not everyone gets a chapter-worthy ending. The lack of full resolution allows the novel to expand beyond its finish, into years we won’t read about but can picture going on parallel to our own lives. When a story can live away from the page, it becomes not just a book, but a fully realised reality.
Sometimes, the endings we hope for won’t ever happen, and sometimes they will, just not in the exact way we desired. Phil’s ambiguous future fosters a lingering sense of maternal worry, and Ed’s every action leads you to eventually walk away wondering ‘well, what next?’. Yet, can my unease simply be attributed to a personal fear of uncertainty, rather than McKenna’s style of work? Roseleen’s image certainly draws out feelings of hope, and the promise of an eventful life to come, even if I remain desperate for a change in her fate.
So, potentially it isn’t Evenings and Weekends inconclusive finish that leaves me with a gnawing sadness, but instead the awareness that its end is no doubt fitting for the tone of the novel; it maintains its true-to-life quality, only this time frighteningly so. Closing the final page, you can’t help but see that what happened makes sense. It is the fact we don’t want it to that hurts the most.
References:
McKenna, Oisin, Evenings and Weekends (4th Estate, 2024)