The Guardian and the Observer by Guardian News and Media

Author:Guardian News and Media
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Guardian News and Media
Published: 2020-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

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Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan review – a bittersweet tale of friendship

From a boys’ wild weekend to fortysomething crisis … male fragility falls under the spotlight in a novel of two halves Elizabeth Lowry | 929 words

Life-sized tragedies … Andrew O’Hagan. Photograph: Amit Lennon/Amit Lennon The Observer

There’s a nod to Alan Sillitoe’s classic about postwar working-class life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – and the 1960 film starring Albert Finney – in Andrew O’Hagan’s ebulliently dark novel about a group of Ayrshire lads coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain. Twenty-year-old Tully Dawson, a machinist in the local factory who “impersonated Arthur Seaton … by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend” is the wisecracking ringleader of this gang. He’s Finney with spiked-up hair and a record collection: where the angry young men of the 50s just had the pub, the angry young men of the 80s have post-punk rock.

It’s 1986, and Tully and his friends are escaping the world of their fathers by heading for the festival of the Tenth Summer at the G-Mex centre in Manchester. For those who weren’t there, this was a lineup consisting of “the Fall, New Order, the Smiths … a nuclear fuckfest of musical talent”. Or something like that: one of the pleasures of O’Hagan’s writing is that he gives the gravity and the absurdity of youth equal weight.

The reality of being young is memorably relayed by Tully’s wingman Jimmy, a bookish narrator with a nicely ironic turn of phrase. The boys set off for Manchester looking “sleek as a week in Saint-Tropez”, sporting soaped quiffs, jeans with turn-ups and, in Tully’s case, “more bangles than a Maasai bride”. In their itchy intelligence and noisy desperation, they’re both lovable and entirely believable. There’s chaotic, alcoholic Limbo, “a standard-bearer for the perfectly surreal”; Tibbs, the querulous Marxist; tech nerd Dr Clogs, an early adopter of the Apple II computer (“He sat inside the house playing Metroid for the second half of the Eighties, learning how to code”); and edgy Hogg, still trying to live down the memory of an early-80s perm.

Cue a weekend of chaos, where everything becomes a setup for a punchline or a bizarre flight of fancy. What instrument would Karl Marx play if he was in a band? (Answer: the glockenspiel. “Because he’s German and it’s about banging metal. An industrial sound, and that fits with what he says about the means of production.”) We get ardent lists: top three films starring Robert De Niro, top three goals ever scored by a Scottish player.

In Manchester the boys make a beeline for the vinyl mecca of Piccadilly Records (“it felt like the headquarters of high taste, full of nodding young worshippers flicking through the bins”) before Tully gets wasted and scales a statue of James Watt, bottle in hand. As Clogs remarks: “Excellent. We have a whole weekend of show-offs and memorials”. Except that O’Hagan somehow makes it seem tender instead of tedious. “At

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