Andrew O’Hagan

Mayflies

It’s been years now since Andrew O’Hagan established himself as an heir to Orwell in the way he can glide from fiction to nonfiction and back again with no loss of literary quality or indeed imaginative power. His latest novel, Mayflies – named for those ephemerids, large winged insects that last but a day – can sometimes look as if it has been written by someone with his nose squashed against the windowpane of life, but that degree of minute detail also gives this apparently documentary novel its air of knockdown authenticity. This is a breathtaking performance about a sunlit, gorgeous, utterly enchanting figure from late adolescence who, at some level, saves the narrator’s soul. But then the moment comes when the soaring super-friend discovers in his early 50s that he’s dying of cancer and he entrusts the narrator with the terrible duty of ferrying him over the waters: in practice taking him to Switzerland, despite the objections of his wife, and ensuring that he can die when he needs to, by euthanasia.

Assisted suicide is a difficult, not to say grim subject for a memoirist or a fiction writer, and a difficult one to sustain with anything like sufficient poise or perspective for someone who is juggling the one to invest in the other. Given the odds, it is remarkable how much O’Hagan succeeds in writing a fresh book about the joys and sorrows of chaste, intense male friendship in the face of the worst things in the world – and he does so without wallowing in sentimentalism or investing too much in the golden light

of retrospection. It’s a discernible risk but O’Hagan outstares it with an overwhelming capacity to present the central character in what Lionel Trilling once referred to as the medium of the novelist’s love.

Tully, the hero, begins as a wild boy, full of a rugged and ragged charisma that comes across as a thing of beauty. He has his father’s green eyes but not his sour defeatism and he takes the world by storm. He notices the narrator with a supreme curiosity and intensity. He looks like the young Albert Finney of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and he spends a lot of his time quoting the kitchen-sink dramas of the early ’60s, which featured the great Northern classical actor in his roaring-boy days. And then in the latter end, as Tully faces (and does his best to face down) the Grim Reaper, he’s still playing with his old pack of tricks – lines from The Godfather, lists of three things never done, three best kinds of biscuits, film scenes involving smoking – all indicating the magic of an eternal youth that fades like the sun.

Mayflies is a far from flawless book but, in its portrayal of a group of people from working-class Glasgow in the early ’80s, it has a sheer realised glamour that leaves a lot of shapelier and more controlled books in the shade. The novel that won the great mate Tully’s heart was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby with its green light. David Malouf ’s Johnno is another book to which

Mayflies might be compared. O’Hagan’s novel has an extraordinary sense of specifics and for stretches it may seem to disappear into an all but inextinguishable fog of blather and ballyhoo and boys’ talk, punning and quadrivial. On the other hand, the story of how the narrator is taken up by his highschool English teacher, and set sailing all the way to Yeats’ Byzantium, is as sharply focused and as brilliantly credible as anyone could wish. If you want an account of the efficacy of the good teacher, put this one in your anthologies.

There is a middle section where the lads go to Manchester to cavort and play up and watch The Smiths and all the rest of them: here the detail goes in and out of focus, and certain supporting characters have their weirdnesses so slavishly delineated that they cease to be quite imaginable. But that at least adds perspective to Tully, so lovingly, so romantically treasured – though Mayflies is not a gay book at all.

O’Hagan is as good as anyone ever was at capturing the sheer superiority of youth, its exotic, poetic quality, the boundlessness of its sense of wonder, and the way it can animate a life as long as it lasts. He’s also very ambitious and formidable at presenting the wonderboy as a man who expects his best friend to arrange the death he wants. Do we completely see the boy in the man? Not entirely, but O’Hagan makes a hell of an effort to allow us to, and much of what he adduces has its own enchantment. Mayflies’ narrator – the Nick to Tully’s Gatsby, a conscious identification in the book – quotes Antony and Cleopatra to his friend: “And make death proud to take us”, a line that Tully clasps like an asp.

Tully’s very loving wife loathes the idea of euthanasia and the way the men shut her out of even the discussion of it. But the novel – if that’s what it is – shows the narrator rattled by guilt and doubt and there is the vision of the wife rising to an occasion she has never sought.

You may be the kind of person who would go a long way round to avoid reading a blow-by-blow, note-by-note novel about the heartbreak of terminal illness and euthanasia, but Mayflies is a pretty extraordinary attempt to show the light shining in the darkness without pretending that the darkness, the light switch, the jump, are not terrible things, however much they are passionately willed and buoyantly sustained.

This is a memento mori of a book of very great poignancy. It shakes you to the core but is also exhilarating.

Sufjan Stevens lives by a mantra: “Keep it moving, keep it real, keep it true.” Over the course of his two-decade-plus career as a songwriter and producer, Stevens has stuck to this admirably.

He cycles through styles and aesthetics, paying no attention to the progression within his own oeuvre, adopting whatever mood best services his current record. He deployed lush, baroque arrangements to convey the vast expanses and complex histories of the American Midwest on the early 2000s classics Michigan and Illinois; unadorned guitar and vocals mirrored the intimacy of communion with God on Seven Swans; glitching electronics provided metaphor for a diseased body on The Age of Adz; and so on. This lack of a traceable aesthetic arc meant that for many years Stevens remained a cult curio, a successful indie artist who, for better or for worse, resisted profound mainstream success.

That changed significantly with the release of 2015’s delicate folk opus

Carrie & Lowell. Raw and open, the record reinvigorated Stevens’ status as an indie hero, drawing him a legion of new, younger fans who celebrated his career through a proliferation of ultra-niche memes and jokes.

While most musicians would relish this kind of renewed, loyal attention, Stevens bristles. The Ascension, his 2020 follow-up to Carrie & Lowell, is a breaking down and rebuilding of his art, a self-described protest album that defies the few conventions he established on past records. An 80-minute epic, The Ascension corrupts and darkens the chaotic electronic textures of his two most comparable records, The Age of Adz and Enjoy Your Rabbit, marking Stevens’ disillusionment with the two constants of his music to date: America and his Christian faith.

Carrie & Lowell privileged a careful, finely wrought confessional, but The Ascension reduces sentiment to its barest bones, replacing embroidery with slogans and catchphrases. Many iconic photos of Stevens depict him wearing massive angel wings; his newest press shots find him wearing a hoodie emblazoned with a huge adidas logo. From its generic, gummy song titles (“Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse”, “Run Away with Me”, “America”) to its sanitised, ’90s-indebted sound – which draws from the industrial crunch of Nine Inch Nails as much as it does Moby’s Balearic pop and Ray of Light-era Madonna –

The Ascension is an unnerving, strange record, profoundly aware of the fact that, to properly critique a rotten America, you have to use its own excessive, blunt-force vernacular.

The most compelling songs on The Ascension use Stevens’ own life as proxy for the ills of the world around him. On the sprightly single “Video Game” he rejects individualism, a founding pillar of American capitalism. “I don’t wanna be your personal Jesus,” he sings, “… I don’t wanna be the centre of the universe.” Stevens is pushing back on the cult of personality that emerged around his own career circa Carrie & Lowell – a phenomenon that manifests at every level of American society, not least in the current era’s conflation of political office with celebrity. On “Tell Me You Love Me,” he doubles down: “My love, I’ve lost my faith in everything.” And on the album’s penultimate song and title track, that loss of faith is rendered chillingly atop little more than quiet synthesiser:

I thought I could change the world around me I thought I could change the world for best I thought I was called in convocation

I thought I was sanctified and blessed

For a long time, Stevens – a gay, liberal, devoutly Christian man – embodied an American dream of tolerance, compassion and self-made success. In order to question the nature of America and Christianity, he has had to first look inwards and reconsider the structures of idealism and iconography that have shaped his life. In interviews, Stevens has expressed how disillusioned he has become with the entrenched, diseased structures of America, and here you can hear his vitriol, his new cynicism. He describes The Ascension as “bossy and bitchy”, but it is much, much less fun than that implies. This is a more difficult listen than even the tortured Carrie & Lowell; although the lyrics are blockier, less ornate than on past records, this record is heavy with psychic terror, defined by squalling synthesisers and drum machines.

In an interview with the music magazine The Fader, Stevens said that his intention with The Ascension was not to provide furious polemic, but to consider how one might fix America on a metaphysical level – “more spiritually ... even existentially”. The sentiment reminds me of former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who believed that Donald Trump was confounding America with a “dark psychic force” and who strongly advocated “harnessing love for political purposes” in order to drive out hate.

Like Williamson’s “return to love”, Stevens counters his soothsaying on The Ascension with some of his sweetest, most sweeping love songs ever. When, on “Tell Me You Love Me”, he confesses his loss of faith, the solution follows quickly: “Tell me you love me anyway.” While his belief in America may be lost, Stevens is looking to bigger, more powerful forces on The Ascension, powers that can withstand the most profound losses of faith. The result is classic Stevens: moving, real and true.