Evenings and Weekends by Oisin Mckenna: book review
Overview: Evenings and Weekends follows the full web of a friend group across the expanse of a sticky London summer in 2019. It feels nearly impossible to summarize, though, because of the immense number of plot threads. Every named character is given a perspective, their own story, at one turn or another. Most centrally, there’s brothers Phil and Callum. Phil is losing his precious warehouse rental while Callum is getting married. Their childhood neighbor, Ed, just found out that his girlfriend, Maggie, is pregnant. They’re not in much shape to have a child, though. Maggie is also Phil’s best friend. Then we delve into the lives of Phil and Ed’s parents, their more extended friend circles, Maggie’s extended circle, and Callum’s as well. Then there’s the random subplot about the whale in the Thames. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 Books don’t tend to have a million characters for a reason. Those that do become about breadth over depth at a certain point out of sheer necessity. There are only so many pages in the novel. I use the hyperbole in the first sentence because I’m truly unsure how many point of view characters there are in the book, and because I read it on my Kindle and I’m currently on an airplane, it’s pretty impossible to thoroughly count.
What I will say is that there are compelling characters here, compelling issues that are honest to the time of the novel. One of the mothers grapples with finding a new sense of honesty with herself as she faces the end of her life. One of the central male characters in the novel stares down accepting possibly the most stereotypical societal role he’s been handed or giving it all up to live as honestly to his desires as possible, even if he doesn’t know what would actually be authentic at this point. Of course, naming these characters would give the book away. Maggie contemplates being thirty and stuck between her London dreams of becoming an artist from childhood and the potential to become a mother, to turn down a very different road. She worries this will be her only chance. Phil is locked in a complicated love triangle that isn’t exactly a triangle. Even the marine biologist who’s trying to save the whale stuck in the Thames that they all gape over is having an internal crisis of her own.
While I enjoyed many of these characters and empathized with them, I also struggled to keep track of them for most of the novel. The sudden POV switches had me scrambling to remember all the details of a character I’d last lived with many, many pages before. I felt like I never fully got to inhabit any one character’s head for long enough to form that deep connection reading offers.
Plot: 3.5 As a byproduct of there being such a large cast, the plot is also all over the place. By generally being arranged around a central friend group, they’re all moving in a somewhat similar direction. There are a number of countdowns that add tension whether it’s losing a flat, moving out of the city, or the big wedding, but these are loose milestones, and not every one of these encompasses everyone in the novel. There’s always little threads you’re chasing as a reader, trying to keep them all straight in your head. As a consequence, the novel loses a lot of its drive.
Writing: 4 I think that my reading experience was greatly, greatly helped by the timing of my reading. I picked it up while I was in London on vacation, living in Dalston on the same street as Maggie and Ed. Because of that, reading the book felt like a scavenger hunt through places and neighborhoods I was just discovering. The book felt like a companion providing context to the world around me just as the world provided the book needed context as well. If you’re not familiar with London, I could see this being a frustrating and somewhat underwhelming reading experience as McKenna relies heavily on London itself to add the contours and textures of the novel. If the Kingsland High Street or the 149 bus, Hackney or Soho evoke no existing pictures or movies in your head, you’ll likely feel lost or indifferent. There’s very little description beyond the extreme specificity of place names. Having just been in London and Dublin, that tactic felt cool. But coupled with the blur of people constantly thrown at you and the meandering plot, that style of handling setting could make this not the most enjoyable read. This has stuck in my mind as a fantastic London novel, but it's not a seamless reading experience.
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