‘Mayflies’ by Andrew O’Hagan    (2020) – 277 pages

‘Mayflies’ juxtaposes two stories from a Glasgow man’s life, one from 1984 and the other from 2017.

In 1984 a group of six young Glasgow men barely out of high school head to Manchester, England for a music festival with some of the indie bands that were big at the time: The Smiths, the Fall, New Order, etc. The six guys are:

Tully, Tibbs, Clogs, Limbo, Dave Hogg, and Noodles

All are from working-class families, all somewhat to the left of Karl Marx, and all disgusted with Thatcherism.

“Thatcherism had passed through the town like the plagues of Exodus. We’d had blood and frogs, and we were waiting for boils and locusts.”

It’s a wild and crazy drinking-and-weed weekend, and it is told by one of the young guys, Jimmy or Noodles as he is called, who is known to read novels during raucous rock shows.

“Six Scottish Pricks Get Wasted in Major European City.”

Although I’m quite familiar with a lot of 1980’s music from perpetually listening to MTV at the time, I am not too familiar with the groups listed above. As part of my research for this review, I asked Google what kind of music the Smiths played:  “Indie rock jangle pop post-punk alternative rock”.

There you have it.

While the six are wandering the streets of Manchester, they see the two most famous members of the Manchester music group The Smiths, Morrissey and Johnny Marr, riding away in a Rolls-Royce. One of our guys from Glasgow picks up a cigarette one of the Smiths has dropped.

“I took a puff. The filter was wet. I passed it to Tully and told him whose fag it was as he had the last drag.”

“He cow’s-arsed it,” I said.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I don’t mind a bit of saliva. The guy wrote “How Soon is Now”.

In the second half of ‘Mayflies’ its 2017, and one of these formerly young guys, Tully, tells Jimmy that he has terminal cancer and will probably die within the year. Tully and Jimmy then set about planning Tully’s exit which includes Tully finally getting married to his long-time girlfriend Anna.

This second half of the novel is darker than the first half, probably necessarily so and that probably is the point that Andrew O’Hagan is making. There is always an end to the good times.

O’Hagan handles both of these vastly different times in a man’s life in an engaging fashion.

Grade:    A-