Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan’s sixth novel, deals with serious subjects: the death of a friend, self-determination, and the devolution of British counterculture to the banalities of Brexit. It aims to do this with a profundity diffused by exuberance and, in this, shows little restraint.
Our narrator is James, a writer recalling the summer of 1986, during which he and his best friend – the irrepressible Tully Dawson – escape their post-mining town in Ayrshire for a Manchester music festival featuring New Order, The Smiths and The Fall. Manchester, for these self-aware boys, is not only the epicentre of Northern Soul but a symbol of working-class energy, from Shelagh Delaney to John Cooper Clarke and from Billy Liar to Coronation Street.
The boys communicate a lot – as boys do – in quotations from films and plays, a habit that signals closeness but also doubles as a spot-the-allusion nostalgia game for readers of a certain demographic: those wearing “a green ex-army shirt, Levi’s with turn-ups, brothel-creeper shoes, and more bangles than a Maasai bride” to a Jobcentre interview in 1986, but holidaying in Sicily and decrying a latter-day working class that votes against its interests by 2017, when the second half of the book takes place.
These conversations are quickfire, as in the Jobcentre example, but sometimes we get help:
The film-reference game was going into full flight. ‘You’re not much good at netball, are you, Jo?’ I said. (A Taste of Honey.)
‘No, I’m bad on purpose.’ (The same.)
‘But hold on,’ I said. ‘There’s a sporting life opportunity here. Head of Keepy-Uppy at a school in Cowdenbeath.’
‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken,’ he said. (Saturday Night).
Faded racists
Thatcherite economics have decimated James and Tully’s hometown, reducing the older generation to faded racists huddling in dreary pubs, and as such this spirit is already nostalgic in 1986. Tully’s father, a sad and senile figure unable to acknowledge his brilliant son, embodies everything Tully longs to flee via the televised revolution: “You get more wisdom from one those flicks,” he explains, “than from the whole of Wullie Shakespeare.”
Unfortunately he also continues to talk in this chummy vernacular. Mayflies is committed to dialogue, obliging this tricky conceit to do much of the work of narrating. It attempts to get backstory, wisdom and depth over with quickly by relying on exposition, as when a schoolteacher explains teenage James to us: “You listen to Shostakovich . . . The other day you mentioned Edith Sitwell . . . you cannot become a fencer’s office assistant, do you hear me? You’ll die. You’re too strange and you like the writing of Jean Rhys.”
Characters discuss their own lives with unearned, vaguely corny, resignation: “It’s an old story, Tully. But your dad tried to make a life.” “He’s from another world.” Such moments read like soft-left scolds reworked for theatre, insisting on the abiding goodness of a certain kind of working-class character – the Oliver Twist of Ayrshire – by suburbanising him.
Zingers and similes abound: a lad landing into a room is like “a bird of prey arriving for tea at the duckling’s end of the loch”, Jobcentre life is “Darwin on springs” (“survival of the lippiest”), and good ’un Tully climbs a war monument to have an apparently spontaneous back-and-forth about boyhood innocence and the proto-Ukip proletariat: “I defend their rights, not their prejudices.”
The Manchester trip is composed of wholesome set-pieces masquerading as anarchy: the boys spray-paint an army careers office, the boys debate football on a bus to Salford, the boys accost barmen and girls outside chippers with ad hoc monologues that sound like Libertines lyrics. At one point someone “chortles”.
Magical night
There is great affection in O’Hagan’s construction of this magical night, which feels joyful and safe. We are to fall in love with Tully – who is a Sebastian Flyte, a Jay Gatsby, references made riskily explicit – but this snags on the fact that we know him only through snortingly expressed, and latterly mainstream, political opinions. Mayflies is not a work of state-of-the-nation literature, but one which either wants to associate itself with state-of-the nation literature or stand in ironic relation to it. It cannot move for its inheritances and influences and it doesn’t seem to know what to do about this clutter – restore or upcycle?
Things change and strengthen, however, in the second half. Tully and James are now fortysomethings and Tully has received devastating health news. The story becomes one of loving and enduringly noble, enduringly vigorous, enduringly suburban efforts to help him hold onto dignity and make sense of his life. He’s become a schoolteacher, James a writer, and both are married to women who function largely to absorb more banter.
The reader’s sense of being inside the best man’s speech of a Gen X Humanist wedding is fleshed out in the form of an actual best man’s speech. The approaching inevitability of Tully’s death, of James’ loss, becomes more real and more authentically melancholy. Beautiful, occasional and fluent flashes of landscape and urban character root it solidly in Scotland and reflect sincere writerly skill.
Above all, the intensity of friendship over the competing demands of family – in this case, of Tully’s wife – are brought under gentle scrutiny and explored with more nuance than has been shown before.
The book reads like a tribute, and doesn’t stray from love and admiration into anything darker. Depending on the reader, this is either a capitulation or a great strength.
Niamh Campbell is author of This Happy
