Andrew O’Hagan’s elegiac look at the bonds and demands of friendship

FICTION
Mayflies
Andrew O’Hagan
Faber & Faber, $29.99

The first half of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies walks a careful line between nostalgia and doomed romanticism. The novel begins in 1986. We meet a group of friends, who have grown up in Ayreshire, Scotland, not far from Glasgow. In the way of teenaged boys, they are obsessed with music and films. They communicate in quotations from gangster movies and 1960s kitchen-sink dramas; they argue about the relative merits of their favourite bands with an intensity that assumes the definitive importance of such cultural allegiances.

Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies divides between innocence and experience, joy and sorrow.Credit: Rosdiana Ciaravolo

Their charismatic leader is Tully Dawson, who is smart, irreverent, and worldly beyond his years. He is, in the eyes of the novel’s narrator James, ‘‘the picture of innocence, the soul of anarchy’’. It is Tully who rallies the group to an uproarious weekend away, in which six close friends on the cusp of adulthood tumble down to Manchester, at that time the centre of the pop-music universe, for a showcase gig headlined by the hippest bands of the day: New Order, The Fall, and The Smiths.

The second half of the novel picks up the story three decades later. James receives a call from Tully, who informs him that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has only months to live. From that point on, Mayflies becomes a novel about the wrenching business of dying and the kinds of solemn reflections that the occasion demands.

The simple two-part structure divides Mayflies evenly between innocence and experience, joy and sorrow. Much of its understated emotional force derives from the straightforward way these two sides of life illuminate each other.

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Early in the novel, there is an amusing scene in which James misses out on a labouring job because the boss spots a copy of Sartre’s Nausea in his pocket and dismisses him as a pretentious egghead, but Mayflies is notable for the scrupulously unpretentious manner in which it addresses existential questions. It recognises that the profundity of death requires no rhetorical elevation or dramatic embellishment. The inevitable conclusion is all the more affecting for its sombre restraint.

O’Hagan has made no secret of the fact that Mayflies is autobiographical and that the character of Tully is based on an old friend named Keith Martin. But the novel is more than just a heartfelt personal tribute. Its elegiac quality extends to its depiction of the working-class culture that shapes the personalities of James and Tully. They forge their enduring friendship against the backdrop of the social dislocations caused by Thatcherism.

The humiliation that was visited upon a generation of northern working-class men is represented in the novel by the shadowy presence of Tully’s estranged father, a defeated man who retreats into embittered alcoholism.

The novel’s cultural obsessions take on their deeper significance in this context. They come to express something more intimate and complex than mere nostalgia. Mayflies is interested in the entwined nature of personal and cultural loyalties. It understands that formative cultural experiences are expansive and outward-looking: they acquire their meaning from the sense of possibility they evoke.

The Smiths as they were in the late 1980s when the characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s novel trek to Manchester to see them.Credit:

Yet with the passing of time these shared experiences inevitably lead to a sense of identification with a vanished world. It is in this sense that seeing The Smiths live at the height of their powers, with their ‘‘haircuts like agendas’’, signifies something more than a fond memory: it is a liberating yet constitutive experience that stamps the characters indelibly as the products of their place and time.

James and Tully chart different courses through their adult lives, but remain bound to that historical moment when the decline of a certain kind of working-class culture became terminal. For James, culture becomes an escape route: he decamps to London, where he pursues a successful career as a writer. Tully returns home and stays true to his beliefs, even though he was always the most clear-eyed about the flaws and limitations of his father’s generation. He continues to play with his band to the very end, and holds firm to his old-left political principles, scorning 21st century progressivism as ‘‘right-wing thinking in left-wing dress’’ and ‘‘woke Thatcherism’’.

The pathos of his death and the bittersweet tone of the novel are, in this sense, more than personal. Tully comes to embody a defiant continuity, a noble but unsustainable idealism. His desire to die with dignity is a last act of resistance.