ANDREW O’HAGAN Mayflies. Reviewed by Paul Anderson

Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel evokes Scotland in the 1980s, the music, the politics, and the bonds of male friendship.

If Mayflies was a record it would be a double A-side seven-inch single with a literary sleeve. It is a remarkable novel of two equal parts – Summer 1986 and Autumn 2017 – both humorous and poignant, about male friendship and formative years.

Andrew O’Hagan is an award-winning British author listed three times for the Booker Prize (for Our Fathers, 1999, Be Near Me, 2006, and The Illuminations, 2015). Mayflies is replete with the best indie bands of the 1980s and some of the cult: The Smiths, The Fall, Joy Division. The Go-Betweens and Birthday Party get fitting references, as do many more. These bands are values for Noodles and Tully, the novel’s central characters. It’s about their brotherhood of credos and life-long commitments; about getting away from small-town upbringings and staying free of unwanted destinies. ‘The Eighties,’ Tully says, ‘The music was magic. And never, until now, did the country feel so divided.’

Summer, 1986. Jimmy Collins (Noodles), age 18, and Tully Dawson, age 20, are bright boys and best friends. They live in box bedrooms in a housing estate in Irvine, Ayrshire. It’s a so-called new town near Glasgow, in reality decimated by the closure of the coal mining industry and Thatcherism. The friends’ two-year age difference is important. Noodles is crucially in his last year of school; Tully has already left and, despite himself, is an apprentice metalworker. They are bonded by a love of indie bands, John Peel, Brookside, kitchen sink classics, right-on politics and (more so for Tully) Scottish football. ‘We were all obsessed with record shops.’ Noodles is our first-person narrator and for him – add poetry.

They go to Manchester with four pals – Tibbs, Hogg, Limbo and Clogs – for the Festival of the Tenth Summer, a (real life) gig at G-Mex to celebrate the anniversary of punk. They must get there: ‘I don’t want to be funny, but if we miss it we might as well be dead,’ says Tully. The weekend is seminal and will forever remain a touchstone for the boys, a peak on the road of birth-school-work-death. Amid the ‘jangly guitars and Coronation Street’ there is the atmospheric sense of an ending – of their youth – and there is an epiphany. Noodles and Tully make a pact to ‘go at life differently’:

… [Tully] changed his life as he looked towards the canal and saw the cranes and the sun over Salford. A guy walked past carrying two Kwik Save bags and Tully flicked a butt into the dirty water. Seagulls went for it. We stood up and wandered. You couldn’t walk much further: ‘Salford Quays Project Team’, it said on a board, blocking the path. We sat back down on the bank, watching flies dancing over the water, and time vanished. I won’t attempt to cover all the things we said there, but it felt like a big conversation.

Tully will go on to night school and a white-collar teaching job within six years. And Noodles already has a place at Strathclyde University and his own way out, aided by the saintly Mrs O’Connor, a high-school teacher who implored him: ‘You’re a weirdo and weirdos have to get out.’

O’Hagan captures their Scottish voices, their ‘fuckan’ patter, superbly. This is O’Hagan the native, also of Ayrshire and of similar age to Noodles. There can be no doubt he and his pals were there. The period detail, the attitudes of the first half are spot on. ‘He [Clogs] dyed his hair black, as many did.’ Derek Hatton from the Trotskyist group Militant is a special guest on the bill at G-Mex and Tibbs shouts:

‘That guy stood up for working people while you lot were in your bedrooms wanking off to the Sun.’

‘He reasoned,’ said Clogs.

The AA-side: Autumn 2017. Jump forward some thirty years. Noodles will turn 50 in May the following year; he is a professional writer, living in London, married to Iona, a busy thespian. And Tully is a Head of English, no less, teaching in the East End of Glasgow, living with his partner Anna, a lawyer. Successful lives, separate, but they remain close. Tully phones Noodles to tell him he has a terminal illness, just months to live. Noodles and Tully make another pact, but this time it’s a profoundly conflicted one: it concerns how Tully will die.

‘I promise. The sky’s the limit,’ I said, stupidly.

‘The sky won’t come into it,’ he said.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Nae bother, Noodles. Maybe we could go back to Cuba. A few of us in Havana. Take a guitar and a few spliffs.’

‘Anything.’

The 30-year gap is structurally bold. Understandably there is a (subtle) change in tone in the second half, appropriate for characters who are older and facing a sombre prospect. The humour is still present – it’s rusted on – but Noodles now says things like, ‘I’m not comfortable’ and knows his Ravel. Mayflies is never crass or mawkish, and is able to be funny ha-ha as well as seriously affirming what is important. As Tully says:

‘I’m like an old man. One minute you’re skanking to the Specials, chugging cider and snorting speed, then, before you know it, you can’t make it up a daft wee hill.’

Anna is furious with Noodles – but really with Tully. She vehemently disagrees with his course of action and feels excluded from the decision-making. There are trips to Sicily and Switzerland as a foursome – Tully, Anna, Noodles, Iona – for last hurrahs. There is laughter, ‘the obvious policy in a time of strife‘, The Godfather schtick and ‘the British custom of turning everything into a drinking experience’. But there is also moral tension and a compunction to ‘invent your life and own your death’.

O’Hagan’s prose is eloquent yet feels effortless. Two examples just of word-choice: ‘vermillion’ provides a laugh-out-loud moment for me as a Smiths fan; and the melodious ‘ephemeron’, which goes to the book’s title. It’s funny throughout: The Shop Assistants have ‘stage absence’; Tully channels Albert Finney’s ‘I dunno, work tomorrow’ in one of several jokes running through the book.

There are clever cross-references to select paintings. One is a portrait of JM Barrie, seeming old, the shadow of his lost brother ‘beside him in the painting’. And the literary references feel wonderfully off-the-cuff (O’Hagan is also Editor-at-Large for the London Review of Books). Noodles finds himself at one point:

… saying something about Graham Greene and his awareness of the struggle to live a complete life. ‘In one his novels he wrote that people who share your childhood never seem to grow up.’

Tully was always the frontman.

O’Hagan has written previously about failed fatherhood (Our Fathers) and the effects of the loss of traditional industries like coal mining on communities (Be Near Me). He returns to these themes in Mayflies: absent and ruined men, the otherwise respectable working class. Woodbine, Tully’s dad, has been made redundant and confines himself to his bedroom, where he drinks, smokes, and watches TV bitterly. Tully is both scared of becoming like him and wanting his validation. Noodles’ dad buggers off early on, ‘in search of himself’. But the book isn’t really about their dads. Noodles and Tully escape them, and instead, through their friendship, become the best versions of themselves.  In the first half Tully mentors Noodles: he knows Noodles is smart, encourages him, and has his back. Tully is a provocateur of sorts, opposed to dead ends: he springs Noodles from his summer job at the Irvine Jobcentre, and Noodles says of him: ‘He was a friend to friendship itself and never expected people to be better than they were.‘ Then in the second half Noodles is the one to assist Tully, ‘to make death proud to take us’.

Tully is based on O’Hagan’s friend Keith Martin and the novel is dedicated to him and his mother Joy Martin. Keith Martin died in 2018, and in interviews O’Hagan has shared his buddy’s request to ‘Please write about us, it will make it last.’ He has responded in kind, breathing life and comedy into sadness. Mayflies could be called auto-fictional, unfolding a universal story of Platonic male love. The characterisation of Tully and Noodles rings so true – their banter, their ‘pish’, is so alive; music is the lifeblood of their friendship, a shared sensibility. O’Hagan put this well during a launch event hosted by Avid Reader. For the Ayrshire boys these were ‘the bands they loved and [they] defined themselves by this love’.

I found myself reading these 26 short chapters slowly because I didn’t want the book to be over. This funny-serious novel is a joyful remembrance of two sides of a life-long friendship: ‘Cheeky Bastards United’, and the flip side, grown-ups, actualised by their love for each other. Tully and Noodles are each other’s saviours in life and in death. If Mayflies was a record it would be on repeat. Fade to ‘There is Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths.

Andrew O’Hagan Mayflies Faber 2020 PB 288pp $29.99

Paul Anderson is an aspiring book editor. He completed the Graduate Certificate of Editing and Publishing course at UTS last year and is an associate member of IPEd. Paul is one of the editorial committee for the 2020 UTS writers’ anthology Empty Sky published in September by Brio Books.

You can buy Mayflies from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Eighties bands, Fiction, male friendship, Mayflies, Scottish fiction