Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies: should have been marvellous

Mayflies should have been absolutely marvellous. There’s Jimmy, looking back from the vantage point of middle age to the summer of 1986, when he and his friend Tully are hovering on the brink of adulthood. They go off for a wild weekend in Manchester – there’s a festival, ‘a nuclear fuckfest of musical talent’. They and their friends are impossible, they are outrageous, and the weekend is everything that teenagers could hope for.

And what more could I want than this sort of elegiac replaying of the past, the sense of looking back over a life, reviewing it. That retrospective bestowing of such significance on the minutiae of our past existence. There’s lots of that here, and it’s very good. On the way to Manchester the coach stops at Gretna Green

‘The service station was surrounded by Scots pines; a breeze came through them and you could sense the border. I don’t think the pines registered then, but they do now, reminding me of the English classroom, Mrs O’Connor and her red hair, Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” – and those final trees, somewhere in the future, where we climbed the hill and the scent said memento mori.’

The sense of looking back over the past from the vantage point of the present adds weight to the scene, gives it meaning – I don’t think the pines registered then, but they do now – a meaning which Jimmy couldn’t have felt back then when he was actually there at the side of the road in Gretna Green. And what about that somewhere in the future? What’s that all about? The ability of Jimmy to look forward, his knowledge of how the whole thing panned out, adds something too.

I thinking of that marvellous Carys Davies’ short story, ‘Sibyl’, which at the end breaks into the future tense, showing the narrator as God – as one who can foretell what is yet to happen. Sibyl is about to die, about to see the whole of her solitary and unfulfilled life flash before her, Carys Davies tells us. But Wade Abello is about to save Sibyl from the flight of a murderous beach parasol – ‘When he sees what’s happening he will break at once into a thunderous sprint of astonishing power and velocity and when …his outstretched fingers reach out and grasp the spinning cotton fringe of the murderous parasol and he falls to his knees in front of Sibyl in the sand – you will know, then, that Sibyl was wrong about the future, and that this, is just the beginning’. And that is how it all ends. It makes me cry every time. Partly because I know what Sibyl does not yet know, because I know that we are both being held safely in the hand of the narrator.

And that’s what Andrew O’Hagan does here in the opening section of Mayflies. And what more could you, or I, want from a story, if a story is there to give structure and meaning to our formless lives? Well, this is what you could reasonably want from a story – for it to be more than a description, for it to go somewhere, anywhere. I’ve never been one for plot, but one thing which I have worked out is that a novel needs something and that something is a sense of momentum, a sense of forward movement, a sense of discovery. It’s sufficient, even, for a narrative to slowly reveal the character of the narrator. But I don’t want to be kept in a holding pattern, endlessly circling over the same topography, the same material. And that’s what Andrew O’Hagan does in the first, opening section of Mayflies.

There’s much that could be worked with to provide a sense of momentum – Jimmy declares that he is ‘divorcing’ his parents, who have in fact deserted him, despite the fact that he is still at school. Tully has a difficult relationship with his father, who is a victim of Thatcher’s industrial revolution. These things are laid out before us, but they aren’t used to drive forward any action in the novel. I feel, depressingly, like reading out to Andrew O’Hagan the summary of Creative Writing 101: there shalt be a problem or some sort of conflict laid out at the beginning of your novel and the rest of the novel should work out how that conflict is resolved. And that’s what Andrew O’Hagan fails to give us.

So when I got to the second section of the novel I breathed a sigh of relief. Now, I thought, now that Andrew O’Hagan has laid out his stall, now that he has shown us the marvels of the youth of Jimmy and Tully, now it will all begin. We have fast forwarded to the Autumn of 2017. And it begins with a bang. Tully has been diagnosed with cancer. It’s inoperable, his diagnosis terminal. And Jimmy is charged with getting Tully to Switzerland.

But we are told all this in the opening pages of the second section, and the remaining 130 pages are devoted to itemising precisely how this happens. There’s no sense of jeopardy, no sense of will he won’t he? No obstacles thrown in anyone’s path.  And killing off your major character makes me feel, as a reader, exploited, as if the author is just pulling on my heartstrings by saying Death! And letting the idea of Death do all the work for him.

But – it’s all true, it all happened. There’s an amazing article in The Times in which Andrew O’Hagan writes about the real life story behind Mayflies. And perhaps the problem is that it’s all too real, too personal, means too much to Andrew O’Hagan. Perhaps he has forgotten that he has to bring us with him too, make us feel it all, tell us quite simply how Jimmy gets from Glasgow to Eaton Square, how Tully escapes from the factory to become an English teacher. He doesn’t feel, perhaps, that he needs to tell us all that since he himself knows it all so well already. And that’s also why, I think, the narrator in the story feels like such a black hole, a blank – because the narrator is really Andrew O’Hagan himself, and writing about yourself rarely works because we know ourselves both too well and simultaneously not at all.

I’m just frustrated that it falls so short. It’s as if, since there is so little narrative development, a better form would have been a short story, a poem, an elegy, a distillation of everything which Andrew O’Hagan so obviously and deeply feels.