Ayrshire-born Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel is a moving exploration of youth, memory and male friendship

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

MAYFLIES Andrew O’Hagan

TFaber & Faber, £14.99

HEY say you know nothing at eighteen, but there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.” So writes James Collins, better known as Noodles, from the vantage point of middle age.

The narrator of Andrew O’Hagan’s impressive sixth novel, James recreates the summer of 1986 when he and a band of friends set off for a weekend music festival in Manchester. Some did not even bring a change of underwear but all carried high hopes. What happened there indelibly changed them all, shaping their aspirations and expectations in such a way that they carried those two days with them as a touchstone for the rest of time.

These raucous, iconoclastic, intellectual, seething and squabbling youngsters are the Mayflies of the title. They are not quite JM Barrie’s perpetual boys but Ayrshire lads so full of spirit, imagination and mischief they give the impression, for a short spell, of being immortal.

This multifarious group, with nicknames like Tibbs and Limbo and Clogs, bond around the charismatic figure of Tully Dawson.

A would-be musician, he fills the house with deafening heavy metal. His father is a disappointed man, but his mother is warm.

She takes Noodles under her wing when his careless parents drift off, leaving him to fend for himself at an age when many teenagers can’t work a washing machine or cooker.

O’Hagan has distinguished himself as one of the country’s foremost writers, in journalism as well as fiction and non-fiction. Here, as in all his work, he shows his eye for the ordinary, using cameos of the everyday as the key to understanding.

In most households, recalls Noodles, “dinner was a secretive affair, a ritual to be executed around six o’clock, when a swift heating of pies, a resentful peeling of potatoes, and a stirring of beans would be carried out in an atmosphere of self-pity”.

Not so at Tully’s, where his mum would occasionally bring out a bottle of wine and elevate a meal into a memorable event.

Inveterate film-watchers, who are forever quoting favourite lines, Tully’s nickname for James comes from the part played by Robert de Niro in Once Upon A Time in America. That savage, poignant story takes the central figures from hustling Brooklyn childhoods into gangster adulthood and disillusioned advancing age.

There is nothing of Brooklyn about Irvine in the 1980s, but as Mayflies progresses a dim connection can be discerned between the outline of the American friendship and that between Tully and James.

With a light touch, O’Hagan captures the mood of conversations between bright working-class boys obsessed with music, books and films, not to mention girls.

When the pals head by bus to Manchester, they are on the cusp of independence. James is shortly going to university to study English, while Tully, who is a couple of years older, is a lathe turner, preserving his energy for his band: “He wanted the cover of the NME and a Peel session and a tour of Britain in a Bedford van. At that time, there was no other version of tomorrow that appealed to him.”

The dialogue between the boys is realistically larky and pretentious, although for anyone not in thrall to The Smiths and Joy Division, there are longueurs.

What does grip, however, is O’Hagan’s evocation of being young. There is nothing patronising or shamefaced in the scenes in which he draws on material familiar to all those who found like-minded friends at this age, and who flung themselves headlong at experience. If O’Hagan does not idealise youth itself, he bestows it with dignity and importance.

The embarrassing gulf between Noodles’s world and that of his parents is succinctly described. For his mum and dad, Perry Como and Nat King Cole were the thing, along with the likes of “ration-book torch singers... dressed to the nines in yellow crochet”.

Idolising Morrissey and Ian Curtis was shorthand for reaching the far bank of a cultural river so wide no bridge could span it.

Ayrshire is O’Hagan’s stamping ground, and its drizzle and neverending Sundays infuse the summer of 1986. His version of the west-coast is far from glamorous – “Thatcherism had passed through the town like the plagues of Exodus” – yet the boys are suffused with restlessness and optimism.

Tully in particular shines bright: “He wasn’t so much the butterfly as the air on which it travels,” writes O’Hagan, profligate with his insect metaphors, but hinting at a Shakespearean otherworldliness and impishness in his hero.

A book of two halves, divided by three decades, Mayflies flits from 1986 to resume in the autumn of 2017. At this point, the brio and charm of the opening develops into arguably O’Hagan’s most powerful novel yet. By now, Noodles is a writer, very like the author in many respects.

He lives in London with his actress partner, but has a caravan on the sea overlooking Arran, to which he often returns.

The second half opens with Tully revealing that he is ill, turning the story from full sunshine to the dark side of the moon. Noodles’ response is to remind him of the lines in Antony and Cleopatra: “Make death proud to take us.” And it is to this doctrine that the rest of the novel adheres.

There’s nostalgia in these men’s friendship, but there is grit too. Tully has come seeking Noodles’s help.

The moral quandary in which Tully places him makes for a profound, often insightful reflection on how

to view our fleeting existence.

Mayflies are evanescent and so are we. “You are a human being,” Noodles tells Tully. “And that’s an unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.”

A novel that touches on many of the themes of earlier novels, such as Our Fathers, Be Near Me and Illuminations, it interweaves urban Scotland, disappointing parents, fame, loss and memory into an elegy for the living as well as the dead.

An assured and self-contained piece of theatre, in which love of many kinds is tested, Mayflies is rich in allusions, gracefully written, yet vigorous.

On almost every page there is an arresting sentence or idea. Occasionally O’Hagan overstrains, but

Andrew O’Hagan’s version of Irvine is far from glamorous – “Thatcherism had passed through the town like the plagues of Exodus”