MAYFLIES (2020/21)
By Andrew O’Hagan
Faber and Faber, 207 pages.
★★★★
Nature has its own rules. Mayflies have an average lifespan of 24 hours. In his sixth novel, Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan uses them as a metaphor to remind us that our own moment in the sun is briefer than we imagine when we bask in our youth and the world seems a cool stream into which we can wade at our leisure.
Mayflies centers on youthful male bonding. At is heart is the lifelong friendship between Tully Dawson and James “Noodles” Collins. Collins has just “divorced” his irresponsible parents. He is bright, well-read, and if his mentor English teacher has anything to do with it, bound for a university education. He’s not sure about that. His real mentor is Tully, whose dad Woodbine is a local soccer legend and whose mother Barbara treats Collins as one of her own.
Like most males in the Paisley suburb of Glasgow, Tully and Noodles are mad about football, especially Celtic, which commands fierce loyalty among Irish-heritage Scots such as they. But it’s 1986, and the Scottish working-class is reeling from Margaret Thatcher’s barbaric economic policies, the crushing of a massive miners’ strike, and her assault on unions. Thus, Tully and Noodles have a love greater than football: punk rock. Punk is to them as early rap was to disaffected black youth: a grassroots voice of defiance, rebellion, and rejection of Establishment values. Not since the mid-1960s had Western society experienced such a generation gap.
The first half of Mayflies depicts a drunken, stoned, f-bomb-laced, snogging, spit-soaked, head-bashing road trip to Manchester, England, for a punk rock band fest. It’s a veritable Mohawk-haired Woodstock–the 10th anniversary of punk–headlined by heavyweights such as The Smiths, The Fall, Shop Assistants, and New Order. Everyone is going, even if means walking away from their jobs to be there. Or perhaps, especially if it means thumbing their noses at employers; Tully proudly calls himself a socialist and is of the anarchist end of that spectrum. Tully, Noodles, “Limbo” McCafferty, and “Tibbs” Lennox set off for Manchester, meet some young women, and run into other mates such as Bobby “Dr. Clogs” McCloy and David Hogg. Of their id-driven descent into mayhem O’Hagan writes, “The night seemed to last forever and there was no direction home.”
What they did not realize as they spiked their hair with Coca-Cola was that they were experiencing an ending, not a beginning. The DYI ethos of anarcho-punk soon gave way to polished musicians and the music fragmented into subgenres such as alt-rock, New Wave, post-punk, and pop songs with grungy echoes. In short order, Thatcher was gone and followed by empty Tory suits like John Major and Gordon Brown. Then, Tony Blair took power, but his government often resembled Thatcherism with a human face, not a revival of the Labour Party.
Move the clock forward to 2017 and Jimmy Collins is a tie-wearing successful writer/journalist married to Iona, an in-demand actress/playwright. Tully has kept the faith, but only sort of; he’s Head of English at an East End Glasgow school and playing drums with a band called Kim Philby*. Tully also has terminal cancer and has two things on his plate before he checks out at age 53. He agrees to marry his long-term partner Anna, a Glasgow lawyer, but he makes Jimmy promise he will take him to Switzerland for a doctor-assisted suicide when his suffering becomes intolerable.
The wedding is more posh than Tully wished, but the Manchester lads reassemble. As is often the case, some remain simpatico and some are not. Clogs still insists, “Punk was right…. We are in a constant state of co-exploitation,” but Tibbs seems “made for reading glasses and sharp angles and a bit of grey.” The nuptials go well enough, but the final decision is tougher. Anna is against it and Iona, though supportive of James, observes, “Men have a way of writing themselves into each other’s experience and placing it away from the women they love.”
Mayflies is a powerful book, but it should be noted that its two settings are radically different in tone. Numerous reviewers have commented upon the book’s “dark humor,” but some have confused smart characters and witty banter with comedy. It is more accurate to say that the first half is shot through with angst and the second with pathos. O’Hagan boots us from the world of potty-mouthed anger and into one described with prose that is eloquent, moving, and reflective. Is it too much of a stretch? Since we know nothing of the intervening 40 years, Mayflies occasionally reads as if it is two different novels welded together with a globby bead. I leave it to you to decide if the shift is too jarring, or an unsettling reminder that we are all mayflies.
Rob Weir
* Kim Philby was a British intelligence agent and double agent who fled to the Soviet Union in 1963, when his cover was blown.
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