Mayflies
Reviews
men having friends too
Beautiful, beautiful book. Highly recommend.
This book is a beautiful memorial to lifelong male friendships. Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news. Content warning for cancer. What happens in this book is obvious for those who read the summary, but this book is not about the destination, it’s about the journey itself, and everything that comes with it. I was afraid to read this book initially because I knew it would cut deep and hurt me on a personal level, and it did, but the best books always do. The depiction of young male friendship in the beginning of this book reminded me so much of my own friendships growing up. This book’s reflective look at platonic male love resonated with me deeply. The writing had so much heart and it gave the story so much emotional weight, despite being a quick read. I loved both halves of this book, from the boys’ wild youthful weekend getaway to the existential crisis in their forties. I loved the themes of this book; The costs of love and mortality, the way true friendship touches our lives, and the responsibility and obligation we have to the people we love most. I loved the tender goodbye to an old union, and the exploration of the hard departures that we all must face in life. While this is an ode to male friendships, I think that everyone should be able to relate to this novel regardless of gender. The reader can see themselves represented as the protagonist, and Tully as a surrogate for the reader’s childhood best friend. These characters are characterized as their own people that hold their own weight, but readers can easily see themselves and their friendships represented through the characters in this story. The ending grabbed my heart and squeezed.
Wonderful
This book has filled the A Little Life hole in my heart. The first half of the book I didnt want to end, the second half I was dreading the ending. I sobbed and laughed with James and Tully. I adore them and this story.
brilliant, powerful, witty and tragic
We say never to judge a book by its cover, yet this cover is exactly the reason I picked Mayflies up. The photo gave me a sense of melancholic nostalgia, making me want to be in on the joke. I was searching for that feeling of free-spirited laughter. And this book delivered, along with so much more. O’Hagan tells the story of a group of friends across two timelines, delving into the world of friendship, class, education, compassion, death, and many, many more topics other authors cannot even touch. My heart ached more and more as I read, and not because of sadness exactly, but due to a sort if “knowing”. I knew the awkwardness of out-grown friendships and aging would be touched on, I knew that someone dying very rarely meets a happy end. And despite this impending sense of gloom, O’Hagan crafted and delivered an absolutely beautiful story. And now I can love Mayflies not only for its cover, but also for the story inside and the questions it brings to the table.
The new Andrew O’Hagan novel ‘Mayflies’ is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Already bought four copies for friends. It’s about friendship, time, the past, present and future. Half of it is based around a pilgrimage to Manchester. It makes you think about what is valuable. “The past isn’t really the past. It’s just music, books and films.” And it becomes even more powerful when you read how real and personal the story is and the novel becomes the most glorious elegy to a friend.
Highlights
the whole of Rusholme was reflected in his eyes.
They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. Morrissey would lose his youth, and not just his youth, but the gusto that took him across the stage with a banner saying The Qucen Is Dcad' is a thing of permanence. We didn't know it at the time, but it was also, for all of us, a tender goodbye, and we would never be those people again.
The full brass of being. 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 romantic and ripe and British, custom-built for the clear-eyed young.
'In the midst of success we are in failure I said. 'Is that in the Bible?' No, but it should be'
But the people I grew up with felt glamorous watching flms, listening to records, or reading books written by people who unfolded their lives, who told of the time they loved and che time they died and the time they danced at El Morocco. We loved black-and-white stills depicting the comedy and the tragedy of private life, or of public life gone wrong. The main characters in my childhood believed in realismn in art, they loved quoting from it, but they also loved its very opposite, pitching themselves as far from reality as they could, knowing fine well that life would be all too real on Monday.
For a second I floated into privacy: the faraway mood of exhilaration that comes with excess, and I loved the excess, and loved the seeming permissiveness of that night. Who would I call, I wondered, if I stepped into the phone box? And the answer - so free of regret - was no one. I had no one to call and I was quite glad about it.
I suppose we could have drifted over to the touchline and asked his opinion, but being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.
‘I know none of us has a monopoly on grief, but I'm struggling'
‘We each have a monopoly on our own, I said.
‘It's been my good fortune to share a story with him, I said, 'and that's all we'll ever have. There's no more. Earth is all the heaven well ever know.
He's heading for a life everlasting in a world greater than this one.
I felt a long way from home - in a good way, in a bad way
- and when Tully was gone, the centre was elsewhere. That's teenage love, isn't it - when the party is less fun because your mate is the party?
I think it was a moment of pure honesty, and maybe we were adults for the first time, sitting by that canal in perfect daylight under the moving cranes.
What we had that day was our story. We didn't have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I'm sure Ifelt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.
They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again,
"It's hard to think about, I said, but it's coming closer.’’
‘'All the important things are hard to think about.’’
It was always a struggle to reach the future, I said.
They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.
He was a friend to friendship itself and never expected people to be better than they were.
She was in many ways smarter than him, and she saw that he was punishing the present for what it was doing – and she was the present, as well as the devastated future, but he couldn’t address it that way.
‘I’ll see you at the gig in a couple of hours,’ I said, eventually. ‘Don’t look back. Go to the car and don’t look back.’ ‘Looking back is all I’ve got,’ he said.
The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.
They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.