Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Andrew O'Hagan's Mayflies?
All right, this is going to be good, isn't it? I loved this book. Put that effing book down. And I think she is the most extraordinary writer.
She's a furious woman.
So I thought I really have to hook the reader. It's taken up half my heart, you know. There are stories in that book that will knock your boots off. Do books make you cry? What about laughing out loud? Well, the book at the heart of this podcast extra edition of the bookshelf made me do both extravagantly. I'm Kate Evans and the book I'm talking about is Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan.
O'Hagan is a Scottish writer who has long lived in London, and he writes some of the best long-form essays and journalism you can find, principally in the London Review of Books. He's also written non-fiction books, his first was The Missing, as well as other fiction, including The Illuminations.
When I spoke to him recently, we began with the laughter and tears of Mayflies, and moved on to other books that have shaped him. Andrew O'Hagan, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
What a pleasure.
Now, congratulations on Mayflies. I have to say I laughed with delight in the beginning and then I wept all through the ending of this book.
Well, you know, in a way I shouldn't be pleased because it's bad to cause people to be upset.
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Chapter 2: How does Andrew O'Hagan describe the emotional impact of Mayflies?
But, you know, your reaction was pretty much mine in writing it. It was always a book of laughter and tears for me. that started from a very real incident, which was the death of my oldest friend. And I realised that when I looked back at our lives as friends, that I'd always wanted to write a fully rounded book about a friendship.
And there was so much laughter in our childhoods, being in bands in Scotland and the West Coast during the 1980s, making life bigger and better than Our parents' lives, we thought. And then 30 years later, to get that call to say that he was terminally ill, I just wanted to connect a whole life's friendship up. And so the laughter and tears were instant, I think.
So this is a story of a fierce friendship. And you've said that it is based on, you know, a real person and a real incident. But if we talk about the fictional characters of Jimmy, the narrator, and his friend Tully, how would you describe Tully?
Tully was that very charismatic person that I think so many of us have in our lives, especially in childhood. He was the classic front man. He was the funniest. He was the best looking. He had the best haircut. He had the highest cheekbones in Scotland and the best record collection in Europe. He was that guy that men and women, boys and girls, all admired him for different reasons.
And he was the hero of a very small town that I grew up in. And the idea that this guy becomes your best friend, you know, that in itself was a kind of operatic achievement. I wanted the book to encompass all that innocence and all that self-seeking that exists for you when you're young, you know? I mean, we all have a childhood, and often at the centre of it was this person.
And that was a 40-year friendship between myself and the person who the character was modelled on. So Tully in the book, you know, I say without hesitation, it comes straight from life for me. This is the most autobiographical book I've ever written.
And I felt that trying to just characterise Tully, to offer a picture of what it's like to have a heroic friend who 30 years later needs you and depends on that old loyalty, but for a whole new set of reasons.
But there are so many different levels to this book. I mean, both the friendship, the place, well, places really, Glasgow, Manchester, and there's a teacher. Jimmy has a teacher, Mrs O'Connor, who encourages him to leave. She says, you're a weirdo and weirdos have to get out.
And as you describe that character, her kindness and association with Pine Floor Cleaner, I realised you told me that story earlier. about yourself on stage when we spoke about four years ago?
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences inspired the characters in Mayflies?
She was this flame-haired Scottish brilliant lady who must have been only in her 20s herself, you know. But when you're 15, you don't really recognize that your elders can actually be quite young. And she took me on.
You know, I came from a big working class family, four boys, mother a cleaner, father a joiner, no money really in the house, no books and no guarantee of further education or any of that. And she just took me by the hand and said, look, you like to be the entertainer. But in fact, you've read more books than I have. You can go places. Let me show you. And she did show me.
She was a miracle worker, really, and the kind of teacher that can transform a life. So I wanted to create a character in the book that was exactly like her. And my imagination was ready for her because, of course, I had met her in real life.
And so this is a novel partly about memory. Jimmy, the character describes memory as something that is made up of music, films and books. But how much is it music that really shapes this book?
I think it's one of the things that makes my generation distinctive. People who were born perhaps from the late 60s to the mid 70s That is almost a generation now. Our fathers, if you're British, our fathers met other men in the army. No, they did national service. We didn't. That had been abolished by the time we were young men.
And our children, on the other hand, meet people through social media. And we were too early for that. So there's a kind of, what I think of as Thatcher's children in the middle, where we met people at bus stops and in youth clubs and in record shops and in cafes. And it's a whole world of... that there was a lot of human contact and uncertainty.
Often you'd turn up at a place and there was nobody there. You'd arrive at a pub hoping to have a meet-up and there was nobody around. It was just a way of life and a way of friendship which has slightly disappeared. And I wanted to write a novel that depended on all the truths of that world. It takes a whole culture to make any good novel.
And the whole culture there was Scotland in the 1980s and then what happened over 30 years. Popular culture was always at the very centre of it for us. I mean, music was our currency. It was our language. You know, it wasn't just a thing on the sideline or like elevator music or something playing in the background.
We gained an entire sense of self, our entire identity from the music that we liked. The things we had in common were movies, music, you know, we could sit and discuss a novel all night, smoking cigarettes and listening to John Peel's famous Radio One radio show. That was our culture.
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Chapter 4: How does memory play a role in the narrative of Mayflies?
And yet I'd never found that culture in a book with the exactitude that I think readers enjoy. So sometimes you sit down and write a book because you want to read it yourself.
Have you read other books that have got close to that, that have that soundtrack on the page, that sort of fizzing excitement?
Well, one of the things I always loved about the American writer Don DeLillo was that he did that very thing I've tried to describe of putting the whole culture into his books. He wrote a book called Libra, which is essentially a kind of novelistic version of of the Kennedy assassination. Its central character is Lee Harvey Oswald.
Libre is a sort of masterpiece of modern writing because it takes the whole culture and goes underneath. There's a sound of the musical landscape is in there, television newsreels, cinema, mystery stories. The whole sort of beat of America at that time has been worked into that book. And that's a real inspiration for me.
There's a game that the characters, the young men, play in the book Mayflies, which is making lists, you know, the top three smoking scenes in any movie. If you were to play that game with the top three books, say, that had shaped you, what would you put on that list?
I could do it right off the top of my head and it would be Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the great Scotsman. And surprisingly, perhaps, a biography which I found on a shelf in a hairdresser's, and my mother was having her hair done when I was a child, and it was called Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Skiles.
It was a biography of Marilyn Monroe. And I came across it, as I say, by accident. And I'm the kind of guy who reads biographies the way some people read thrillers. I just love reading about lives rather than plots. I'm not a very plotty writer myself. I'm much more caught up with what happens in a family or what happens in one person's life.
And they're the kind of stories that I think really connect to people's hearts in the end. They identify with the shape of a life and the consequences of decisions that are made or accidents that occur. But this book about Marlon Monroe, I'll never forget finding it.
And it had this very striking picture of Marlon with a gold lammy dress on the cover and just opening it and beginning to read about this childhood in Los Angeles. And then this career in the movies and these tragedies and these marriages. And I was lost, absolutely lost in this story. And it taught me something about writing. which is about inviting the identification of the reader.
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Chapter 5: What significance does J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan hold for Andrew O'Hagan?
And also Robert Burns, the great Scottish poet, who's another writer whose collected poems have punctuated my life From first learning to read to right now, Robert Burns' voice is part of my inner ear now almost. I hear that delightful, very kind of democratic sound. The sound of humanity speaking to itself and each other is there in those poems.
So Robert Burns, I suppose, a bit like Marilyn, is a kind of leitmotif, a constant image that returns and always makes a little appearance in the books at some point.
But in Mayflies, there are other books that appear, indeed entire bookshelves that are passed on as part of the friendship. But there are specific books too by Henry James, Graham Greene, Yeats. But there's a Penguin edition of David Copperfield that really stands out too. I wonder if you could tell us about that.
Yes. There was in fact a book, the 1970s edition of David Copperfield by Ed in the Penguin edition, was read again and again by me, and I'd pass it back to my friends because, although it's a very exciting story, but it also reveals something about how to be a person and also how to be a friend. The friendships in that book are incredibly memorable.
Steerforth, immediately when he arrives on the page, seems like a great friend. He's a bit like that guy I described, the popular... heroic, good-looking figure who you want to be your best pal. And David Copperfield, he proves a bit of a disappointment. He's a bit of a double dealer. And that's a big energy in that book.
But other friendships exist sometimes across generations, that there's an older person and a younger person who forge an alliance or an understanding. And that always appealed to me in books when I was younger. I always was drawn to books, probably for
pretty straightforward psychological reasons, always looking for an adult to depend on, looking for an adult who could take you in hand and show you the world. So books that had that at the centre of it have always really appealed to me.
And those other books that I mentioned in passing, the Henry James, the Graham Greene and so on, are they books that have been or writers that have been particularly influential to you?
They have. I mean, I've loved Henry James. I mean, I think certainly all of my adult life. He's not in any sense an author that you take to when you're very young. I mean, he's complex as a stylist. I mean, his paragraphs and sentences can be very long and very involved and full of sub clauses and so on. But he's worth sticking with.
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Chapter 6: How does Andrew O'Hagan incorporate music and culture into his writing?
That became a sort of theme for me and it was borrowed from Henry James because he sort of pinned that Indian ambassadors.
There's also a line from Shakespeare about living and dying that is really important to the book. And then there's a line that doesn't appear, but it's almost an echo because the characters do talk about J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which is a sort of melancholy book, but it also has that terrible line from Peter Pan that death might be an awfully big adventure or something like that.
Can you tell us about J.M. Barrie?
J.M. Barrie has always been such a crucial writer for me. When I look back at the novels that I've written and the non-fiction too that I've written, J.M. Barrie's spirit is always in there somewhere. Peter Pan is such an incredible modern myth. It's one of those stories that seems so psychologically true that we all could be stuck in childhood or there could be a boy who never grew up.
It seems so psychologically true that it's like a Greek myth. You know, it has that quality to it. You can hardly believe that one man, J.M. Barry, wrote that story. It seems almost like a kind of fairy tale of some sort that just exists in every culture.
And so for me, with this book, because there is this question of the glorious youth dying young and just the struggle to accept that in the midst of life you can begin to lose your life, J.M. Barry's spirit was there for me. And I found myself... reading Peter Pan again and again, trying to find the essence of that story.
Because it's really a tragedy when you think about it, that the other children get to grow up while Peter Pan's always stuck at the window. Yes, he can fly. Yes, he knows Neverland. But actually, he's stuck at the nursery window, tapping on the glass, somehow excluded from the reality of life. The reality of life being that one lives and grows and eventually dies.
that somehow immortality is not all it's cracked up to be. But it's a bit of a curse, actually, for Peter. And that book carries all that in the form of a children's story. And it's actually like so many children's stories. There's something quite frightening at the centre of it.
Yes, it's terribly melancholy. And his life was also a tragic one in some ways.
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Chapter 7: What are the influences of classic literature on Mayflies?
Because this creature, Peter Pan, is condemned in a sense, trapped, imprisoned in youth. And I mean, for Mayflies, that was a scene that was just staring at me. Because what is memory if not a kind of entrapment? You look back at your childhood and you think, Well, you can take pleasure in it because it's gone, really.
But if you'd always been stuck back there, never able to grow, well, that's a different sort of nightmare to conjure with.
Andrew, I keep on asking you about books that are explicitly part of this latest novel, Mayflies. But what were the books that you think of when you think of a bookshelf that feeds into this one?
Well, I mean, one of the things that will be interesting obvious to me and less known to most readers, I think, is the explicit use of a lot of those, what we thought of as kitchen sink dramas in England and Scotland during the period of my parents' youth.
So in the 50s, the late 50s and early 60s, writers like Alan Silito with his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which became a famous film starring Albert Finney, or plays like A Taste of Honey, a great masterpiece written at the age of 19 by the Salford writer, Sheila Delaney. These were big influences on this novel.
In many ways, it's a novel about working class experience, about a group of boys trying to vault the fence and change the pattern and find their creativity and their freedom out there in the world in the 80s in a way that their parents never really managed to. And so in that sense, it's a coming of age story, a coming of class story.
What happens when the features of a particular class, in this case the working class, change? What happens when suddenly there's opportunities for those kids to go to university or become artists or even, God forbid, writers? That's part of what I was trying to chart there.
Those texts, Saturday night and Sunday morning especially, which tells the story of Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham lathe turner who works in a factory, who's trying to sort of change his life and open himself up to new experience. But of course, there's a whole heavy world of working class tradition around him, which he has to struggle against.
So definitely those books and plays were in my mind as I was even drafting the book.
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Chapter 8: How does Andrew O'Hagan reflect on friendship and nostalgia in his work?
She was living in a trailer park near Reading in England by that point, on her own. I went to see her and she said, you know, they were just boys. You know, they had their day in the sun. And the way she said it in so much of the twilight of her own life made me realise that there's a kind of forgiveness in it too, that some people's freedom is other people's repression.
But in the end, if you're able to imagine a freedom for yourself, then there's a sort of deliverance from it. And that's certainly the message she gave out.
And that idea that they were just boys, I mean, I feel like I can hardly even talk about that part of your book without wanting to start weeping again. I was so caught up with these men and these boys and what they were to each other.
Well, you know, I share that feeling exactly with you. Sometimes you want to write a book. As a novelist, you want to write a book that is like the books that broke your heart when you were young. And this was that book for me. The responses to this one have been overwhelming to me. People take it really personally, this book.
Perhaps because we all have a part of our lives we can look towards in that way. It is gone forever, but never really gone. Because nostalgia isn't really a thing. It doesn't exist because the past is never really the past. It's just an enlargement of the present. You're always back there. It's always returning.
There's a kind of Scott Fitzgerald sort of endless return of the past rolling back towards you all the hours of your life. And this is a book that sort of really travels into the centre of that thought. There's an image of those boys, even as one of them is facing death, there's an image of perpetual youth in front of him. And it isn't some bleedy, distant image from the sentimental past.
It's a reality inside him. He's looking at the world with the same eyes. He might be older. They all might be older. It's the same eyes. And it's worth remembering that.
Those images, they really do fizz and sort of bubble with the joy and passion of it. Can I tell you some of my favourite lines from your book? Oh, please. The boys are in Manchester. They're separated from their friends. They see the band The Smiths in a pub, like they actually see them, not not performing. Yeah. And of Morrissey, you write, ''He hit the air like a chip pan fire.''
And then not very long later, it was like a branch of philosophy crash landing in front of you. And it sort of made me laugh with joy. There was something about those descriptions that I just loved.
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