“The past isn’t really the past. It’s just music, books and films“
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Fiction, Coming of Age Novel, Historical Novel.
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review in one word: Halcyon (and On and On)
*Contains no spoilers
This is both an unsentimental and deeply emotional novel, a book about past, present and future friendship set over the course of 30 years. It’s beautifully written, witty, funny and like a sweeping, never-ending poem with masterful dialogue and deeply authentic characters. In the end, you feel like you know them, and they are your friends too.
At the novel’s heart is an enduring friendship between Jimmy – a bookish and bright guy in his late teens and 20 year old Tully, a charismatic, larger-than-life natural leader into whose orbit everyone lucky enough falls, and who has a remarkable capacity for love and affection for all those around him.
“Loyalty came easily to Tully. Love was the politics that kept him going. ‘Stay free’ he said. I looked over at the trees. Everything was new and everything was fresh. The service station was surrounded by Scots Pines, a breeze from them and you could sense the border. I don’t think the pines registered then, but they do now. Those final trees, somewhere in the future, where we climbed the final hill and the scent said memento mori.”
― Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
The story begins in the summer of 1986 in Glasgow when Jimmy and Tully and others in their group of working class friends plan a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Manchester to see the big luminaries of the rock scene like The Smiths, New Order and The Fall play in an unforgettable weekend.
Along the way the novel examines the big topics: friendship, youth, ageing, mortality, immortality and the things that really matter to us in the end. There is a quiet, poetic and bittersweet thread that wends through the novel, that makes it universal. This could be about anyone’s life – full of both tragedy and comedy, love and darkness.
“If being young is a crime scene,” I said, “the evidence from that night is everywhere.”
― Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
The banter and camaraderie of the young friends and how they discuss their record collections, political future, Thatcher, films and the culture of the time really resonates if you are were in Britain during this time, or if you have seen the films Control or 24 Hour Party People you will understand the cultural landscape. The entire book is packed with nostalgia and loving longing for the past.
“The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.”
― Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
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 ripe and British. Custom-built for the clear-eyed young.
― Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies
As someone who had a youth filled with these kinds of wild “times” attached to music, friends, freedom, drama, love and sublime moments pregnant with possibility and everything else associated with that… I can totally relate to this part of the book. Reading it I could shine a mirror into my own past – just with different music and in a different decade. I also love the Manchester post-punk sound so this hit deep with me.
Other reviewers on Good Reads lament that this partying part of the book fell flat for them and they skipped it. It is possible (sadly for them) that they didn’t spend their own teens and 20’s in the best way they could – enjoying themselves.
The second act of the novel is a fast-forward of the friends who meet again 30 years on and are deep into their middle age. The way that time and their choices have rendered the men different from each other comes into sharp relief. Two of the group: Tully and Jimmy are strongly bonded and their friendship has weathered the ravages of time. This is an emotionally powerful narrative of friendship, love, loyalty, music and nostalgia that will stay with you and haunt you after you’ve read the final page.
Content Catnip 