Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan review – a bittersweet tale of friendship

There’s a nod to Alan Sillitoe’s classic about postwar working-class life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – and the 1960 film starring Albert Finney – in Andrew O’Hagan’s ebulliently dark novel about a group of Ayrshire lads coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain. Twenty-year-old Tully Dawson, a machinist in the local factory who “impersonated Arthur Seaton … by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend” is the wisecracking ringleader of this gang. He’s Finney with spiked-up hair and a record collection: where the angry young men of the 50s just had the pub, the angry young men of the 80s have post-punk rock.

It’s 1986, and Tully and his friends are escaping the world of their fathers by heading for the festival of the Tenth Summer at the G-Mex centre in Manchester. For those who weren’t there, this was a lineup consisting of “the Fall, New Order, the Smiths … a nuclear fuckfest of musical talent”. Or something like that: one of the pleasures of O’Hagan’s writing is that he gives the gravity and the absurdity of youth equal weight.

The reality of being young is memorably relayed by Tully’s wingman Jimmy, a bookish narrator with a nicely ironic turn of phrase. The boys set off for Manchester looking “sleek as a week in Saint-Tropez”, sporting soaped quiffs, jeans with turn-ups and, in Tully’s case, “more bangles than a Maasai bride”. In their itchy intelligence and noisy desperation, they’re both lovable and entirely believable. There’s chaotic, alcoholic Limbo, “a standard-bearer for the perfectly surreal”; Tibbs, the querulous Marxist; tech nerd Dr Clogs, an early adopter of the Apple II computer (“He sat inside the house playing Metroid for the second half of the Eighties, learning how to code”); and edgy Hogg, still trying to live down the memory of an early-80s perm.

Cue a weekend of chaos, where everything becomes a setup for a punchline or a bizarre flight of fancy. What instrument would Karl Marx play if he was in a band? (Answer: the glockenspiel. “Because he’s German and it’s about banging metal. An industrial sound, and that fits with what he says about the means of production.”) We get ardent lists: top three films starring Robert De Niro, top three goals ever scored by a Scottish player.

In Manchester the boys make a beeline for the vinyl mecca of Piccadilly Records (“it felt like the headquarters of high taste, full of nodding young worshippers flicking through the bins”) before Tully gets wasted and scales a statue of James Watt, bottle in hand. As Clogs remarks: “Excellent. We have a whole weekend of show-offs and memorials”. Except that O’Hagan somehow makes it seem tender instead of tedious. “At that age,” explains Jimmy, “you can’t speak about courage or what kind will be required or how much.”

If the sheer performative energy of the first half of the book can be exhausting, it never obscures the fact that these fierce young men are really “as soft as Tunnock’s Teacakes, sentimental as sherbet”. For this is, above all, a novel about a subject that’s not often explored at length: male friendship and male fragility. Paraphrasing LP Hartley, Jimmy muses that the past is not only a foreign country, but “a whole other geology”.

In the second half of the novel there’s a seismic shift to the present. Saturday night is all played out; Sunday morning has arrived. It’s 2017, and the boys have become middle-aged men, as boys must. Jimmy is now James, a respected writer. One day he gets a call from Tully, the “live wire” who was once “healthy and unmarked and had his whole life ahead of him”. Tully has bad news. And he has a particular favour to ask his old friend that will test their friendship and their courage to the hilt.

Which isn’t to say that Mayflies suddenly takes a turn for the sombre. Even in the face of mortality, “Tully’s comic engine” revs on. So does the mischief around monuments; a manic scene in which Tully, on holiday in Sicily, leaves a votive offering of opium in a church before belting out Joy Division at the altar is reminiscent of Arthur Seaton’s awkward pranks with dead rats. There are more lists: top three smoking scenes in films, top three biscuits. “We end up talking pish,” says the fortysomething Tibbs – a beautifully realised character, in whom youthful belligerence has been “burned away by love and duty” to reveal a bedrock of decency – “when in my head it’s all life stuff and crushed hearts”.

Late in the day, O’Hagan implies, it’s easier to see the banter for what it is: a gallant attempt at processing the fact that being human is “an unstable condition that ends badly for all”. This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a “litany of small tragedies”, these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either.

• Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.