Andrew O'Hagan's Mayflies - 'And make death proud to take us'

 

Around a decade ago, I asked Andrew O’Hagan if The Great Gatsby had been on his mind when writing the novel Be Near Me. Both books revolve around an invocation of the past - and an attempt to bring it back into the present - and, less thematically, begin with parental advice and close with a light receding in the distance. O’Hagan told me, that whilst there might have been an unconscious element at play in this, it certainly wasn’t intentional. He then went on to prove that Scott-Fitzgerald’s masterpiece was lodged firmly in his own consciousness by accurately quoting in full the powerful final lines of Gatsby.   

 

Reading O’Hagan’s latest novel Mayflies brought that conversation back to me. Again, this is a novel about the past and its relationship with the present, but this time the Gatsby allusions are specific and direct. The moral is the same, but here lessons are learned. You cannot reclaim or relive the past, but - if you have a modicum of wisdom, as Tully the charismatic hero of Mayflies does - you can remember it and celebrate it. Here is Tully reminiscing with Jimmy, the narrator of this outstanding novel, a story split into two halves. The first is set in mid-80s Ayrshire and Manchester, the second in the terminally-ill present, with Tully taking control of the end of his life and insisting on a Dignitas aided end in Switzerland. 

     'When I went to night school to get the Highers,' he said, ‘the first thing I read was The Great Gatsby. And the copy I read was in that shelf of books you gave me. It had all of your pencil markings on it, images underlined. And all this time later, it’s still my favourite book.’
     ‘The green light.’
     ‘That’s right. To me you were always the narrator – Nick Carraway. And I was the guy who’d end up face down in the swimming pool.’
     ‘Don’t say that.’
     ‘It’s true. But you know what, buddy? We had the party. We had our story.’ He lifted his glass and walked to the garden wall for a better view of the city. ‘That’s it – the whole mad thing.’ He looked at the miles of buildings. ‘It’s like an explosion of life happening and then it’s gone,’ he said. ‘We had our time, buddy. I’ve come to terms with it and I’ve never been to Switzerland and I’m ready.’

Reading my brief synopsis followed by these lines of dialogue, might well give you the idea that there’s a moroseness about Mayflies. And whilst it is an often sad, sometimes heart-breaking tale, it is also a joyous affirmation of life, a reminder that time is finite and that it is crucial to make space for the things and the people that you love. 

The first half is awash with glorious music, and in particular, The Festival of the Tenth Summer, a Manchester music event attended by the characters of the novel, featuring bands such as The Smiths and New Order. This is life lived in the moment, yet paradoxically long past and only fully appreciated from the present. The villains of the 80s are brilliantly skewered - Thatcher, unemployment and dead-end jobs, small-mindedness and parochialism - whilst its cultural touchstones, and not just the music – films and art and football - are celebrated with heartfelt flare, one that makes you appreciate O’Hagan’s dazzling Renaissance-man qualities. A paragraph can start with riffs on The Godfather, and then breeze lightly onto Shostakovich and Debussy, or the Chagall paintings hanging on the wall of the Kronehalle restaurant in Zurich, and end with the rivalry between the Celtic and Rangers football clubs. And this is all delivered with perfectly crafted prose: focused and unflinching, yet still managing to lift the workaday towards the poetic. A greasy spoon in the Manchester city centre:

     A Russian samovar stood on the counter at the Peterloo Café, gushing hot water while the night-shift workers brooded over their runny eggs. They had slices of white bread plastered with butter, and sleepily stubbed them into their plates, soaking up the yolky mess and wolfing it down between puffs on their fags. It was a silent ritual, sluiced about with tea.

And then the scene-setting is often followed by the kind of dialogue that makes you want to join in.

     ‘Top three characters from Coronation Street,’ Tully said as he snapped some change on the table and nodded politely to the waitress.
     ‘Past or present?’ I asked.
     ‘All time.’
     ‘The Popular Culture of Manchester, 1960-1986.’ That could’ve been Tibbs’s specialist subject on Mastermind. He rubbed his hands, then dropped his finger on the table like a depth charge, set to explode with precision and truth. ‘Albert Tatlock. Ken Barlow. Mike Baldwin.’
     ‘Sexist pig,’ I said.
     ‘Tatlock’s up there,’ Tully said. ‘But Barlow?’
     ‘Elsie Tanner. Ena Sharples. Hilda Ogden,’ I said. Tully borrowed one of my T-shirts and nodded vigorously when his head popped through.
     ‘There’s no arguing with Sharples.’
     ‘Baldwin owns the factory,’ Tibbs said, ‘so he’s obviously a class traitor. But he’s a wind-up merchant and he’s funny, so it’s fine.’
     Tully lifted the remainder of Tibbs’s Coca-Cola, using it to spike his hair.
    ‘There’s this photograph of Violet Carson, who played Sharples,’ I said. ‘She’s dead now. In the photograph, she’s standing on a balcony over Salford, and it tells you everything you need to know about everything.’
     ‘I’ve seen it,’ Tully said. ‘It would make a great album cover.’
     ‘All vanished now.’

I caught myself smiling broadly as I read this passage, and torn between coming up with my three favourite Coronation Street characters, or looking up the photograph of Violet Carson. I chose the latter. It’s a stunner. Carson, leaning on the balcony of a high-rise flat, arms crossed, glum of gaze, surveying the Salford kingdom that she once ruled from the snug of the Rovers Return. In the background - and in L.P. Hartley's sense - is a 'different country': factory, home, church and - probably - a smattering of pubs. They did things differently there. 

 

Violet Carson, Photograph by John C Madden

And then re-joining the lads in the Peterloo Café and offering up Vera and Jack Duckworth, and Reg Holdsworth - but only in the scenes with Curly Watts – as my top three Corrie characters. It’s testament to the three-dimensionality of Tully and Jimmy and their friends, that you want them to exist outside of the novel. The Godfather features throughout the story, with Tully and Jimmy quoting freely from the films. You want to take them both aside and ask them what they thought of The Sopranos. Likewise, with The Smiths, there is an urge to interrupt and ask them how they feel about Morrissey now he's become - and this is the answer that I project on their behalf - 'such a racist prick?' These lads live and breathe and exist, almost more so when the book is put aside. They make you want to look up your own old friends. What more can you ask of that from a novel?

The Festival of the Tenth Summer itself is dealt with brilliantly. I was almost afraid that O’Hagan wouldn’t go there; that our narrator wouldn’t get in and deliver his verdict. It is almost the case. But here we are, and here's the 'racist prick' himself taking to the stage, and of course for those moments you forgive all. This is writing that takes you both out of yourself and touches you in a way that is quite extraordinary. I've read this passage over ten times - and even though part of me gets angry about it, a feeling of betrayal over what Morrissey has become, or perhaps, indeed, what he always was - it also moves me and makes me smile and makes me hanker for the type of gig that lifts you into another universe. 

     Aubrey Beardsley in white jeans: Morrissey in his prime. The singer wafted into view and sold his drowsy reticence like a drug. The band was at its height, romantic and wronged and fierce and sublime, with haircuts like agendas. Morrissey came brandishing a licence, a whole manner of permission, as if a new kind of belonging could be made from feeling left out, like nobody knew you as he did. Time takes nothing away from it, those thousands of heartened teenagers taking the roof off and giving out to a gawky frontman from Stretford.
     Tully found me and pushed me down to the stage. Over the speakers the sound was scratchy, but every word and every guitar lick felt like a statement only they could make, and only we could hear, those songs rolling from the stage to irrigate our lives. “That’s what it’s all about,” Tully shouted and he kissed my cheek as we sang.
     I could see Limbo at the very front, whirling out of his skin, holding up a smoke and shouting about panic on the streets of Carlisle. Then he was near us and wagging his finger in time to the music, a wonderful look on his face, singing about a vicar, about Joan of Arc, and throwing plastic tumblers into the air. Our hair was soaking wet. The Ayrshire boys appeared from all corners of the hall, and we hugged and the music soared and it seemed like a huge animation of the things that mattered to us then. Tibbs and Hogg, Limbo and Tully and Clogs. The full brass of being. Who knew what time incubated or what life would demonstrate; we were there, beyond navigation, floating through the air. We beamed to the rafters and jumped shoulder to shoulder. And the words we sang were daft and romantic and ripe and British, custom-built for the clear-eyed young.

There’s also something else in this passage, a glorious  rebuke to Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg and their careless vandalism of ‘the Union’. It illustrates - certainly to me, a northern lad living in London - that I have so much more in common with indie-music fans from Scotland than I do with a group of self-entitled mediocrities from Eton. Not that I ever needed a book to tell me that. 

Despite - as I've already hinted - it being a lesson of a book, it also has a curious balance, one that doesn’t preach solutions, rather letting you into the secret that life consists of moments of grace. Perhaps we are never quite able to fully enjoy life in the present. Perhaps we get overly anxious about that. For every reminder or edict that we ‘need to live in the moment’, we also need to take time-out and remember that there are remarkable pleasures to be sought from memory. Yes, nostalgia can be a curse - let’s not forget that the word tows algos, the Greek root for sickness, behind it. But it’s the only tool that we have that allows us to gauge where we have been, where we are, and where we would like to go.

As you can imagine, finishing the book was tough. And not just because of the inevitability of the ending, but also because you didn’t want to let these ‘friends’ go. A few years ago, I wrote about coming to the close of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and the sense that I had a duty to read the final execution scene at the same time of day that it took place, early in the morning. It helps that my senses are certainly more alert at this time. Likewise, with Tully’s trip to the Dignitas clinic, I felt the need to read early in the morning. As I flicked through the final few pages, I pondered the line from Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra that had resonated throughout the novel: ‘And make death proud to take us’. Without spoiling the ending – other than to say it is utterly pitch-perfect - O’Hagan has written a book that, nevertheless, manages to completely sidestep tragedy. Instead it resounds with affirmation, beauty, celebration and love. I urge you to read it.