Early in Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, his sixth, the narrator James goes for an interview for a job as an office boy at a fence-building firm in Irvine, a town in Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland. It’s 1985 and James is 17. When he turns up, the foreman takes one look at the “tattered copy” of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre poking out of the pocket of James’s borrowed suit and tells him to stop wasting his time. “Away you to university or something.”
“The idea at home,” James remembers, “had been that I’d get out of school as fast as I could and get a job.” But an inspirational English teacher tells him that the man at the fencing company, and not his dysfunctional family, is right. “Pass the exams and go,” she says. “Don’t look back. You’re a weirdo and weirdos have to get out.”
He does get out — like O’Hagan himself, in fact (he has described Mayflies as an “autobiographical novel”): first to university in Glasgow and then to London, where he makes a successful career as a writer. But he never stops looking back, and his fidelity to the past and to what his creator once called the “unplaceable sadness of belonging” assumes here the shape of an act of love.
That bit of the west of Scotland overlooking the Firth of Clyde has provided the fuel for O’Hagan’s fiction in much the same way that the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, powered the later novels of Philip Roth. Ayrshire for him, as Newark was for Roth, is theme as well as setting. In this book it’s both the place James prepares his escape from and the crucible of the most important friendship of his life.
Tully Dawson has natural charisma and a “brilliant record collection” and, like James, is “ready for flight”. The first half of the novel is set in the summer of 1986, when the two young men and their mates are plotting a trip south to Manchester, where several of their favourite bands are due to play at a festival marking the 10th anniversary of the first summer of punk.
James and Tully are what would once have been called working-class autodidacts, though of a historically specific kind: their curiosity is nourished not, as their fathers’ generation’s would have been, by night classes or the Workers’ Educational Association but by the New Musical Express. Their cultural touchstones are the kitchen sink dramas of the early 1960s, which they watch on sedulously hoarded videos and quote with winning fluency, and the music of New Order, The Smiths and The Fall.
There’s a background hum of generational conflict here — especially in James’s case. He effectively “divorces” his parents and ends up spending most of his time at Tully’s house. Tully’s relationship with his father, while also difficult, is more complex. And O’Hagan clearly intends it to carry some significant historical and political freight.
Woodbine, as Tully’s dad is known on account of the brand of cigarette he smokes, is a former miner who lost his job after the strike of 1984-85. At the dining table one night, he surprises his son and his friend with his knowledge of the Russian Revolution. Thirty years later, James remembers how Tully delivered food to the families of striking miners. He would “tell them he was proud of them . . . He knew something at eighteen that the government never knew, that closing those industries would murder those people, and it did.”
Most of all, though, the first half of the novel is a heady, intoxicating evocation of the other “things you know at eighteen that you will never know again”. The Ayrshire contingent sweeps into Manchester on a Friday afternoon “like air into Xanadu”, heading straight for a record shop “full of nodding young worshippers” at the altar of post-punk.
James spends the night at a house in the Manchester suburbs, where he is interrogated about his “influences” by a man in National Health glasses, before joining his friends for the festival the next day. There they pay homage to their heroes, Mark E Smith, “the Fine Fare Baudelaire”, and The Smiths, “fierce and sublime, with haircuts like agendas”.
This section culminates with the gang sweet-talking their way into The Haçienda. “If The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was a club,” Tully declares, “it would look like this. A place for the working man to forget himself.”
The second half of the book is set 30 years later and begins with Tully calling James to give him some terrible news. When they meet later on the Ayrshire coast, they hatch an agreement that is partly a way for James to discharge the emotional debts he incurred when he left Irvine three decades earlier.
The narrator in O’Hagan’s 2006 novel Be Near Me says that the idea that you can forget the past is a “vivid illusion”. Mayflies is a beautiful and deeply moving recapitulation of that truth. The past might be a foreign country, but it’s always with us, whether we like it or not.
Mayflies, by Andrew O’Hagan, Faber, RRP£14.99, 288 pages
Jonathan Derbyshire is the FT’s acting deputy world news editor
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The Link LonkSeptember 08, 2020 at 11:01AM
https://www.ft.com/content/8856eb89-627e-49a1-aa25-f258514318f8
Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan — forget me not - Financial Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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