Mayflies

He laid it on the table. Ephemeri Vita: or the Natural History and Anatomy of the Ephemeron.

“Eight engraved plates,” I read. “And the date, 1681.”

“A beautiful publication,” he said. “Swammerdam believed that no being was higher than any other being, a revolutionary thought at the time. He wrote this book one summer in Sloten, outside Amsterdam. He filled it with poetry and visions as well as anatomical observations.”

“It's really wonderful,” I said. “Mayflies.”

Author Andrew O'Hagan and I are about the same age, so I need to begin by acknowledging that Mayflies – essentially an examination of the anatomy of a friendship and the evolution of the people in it, firmly rooted in the times they live through – perfectly captured the era and spirit of my own youth before jumping ahead to my own, less manic, present. Opening in 1986, I perfectly recognised that group of wild youth, hair spiked and bouncing off the walls, listening to New Order and Joy Division and The Smiths; that was us; that was me, and I loved every bit of the first half. The second half revisits this group of friends in 2017 – now with their jobs and their families and their mortgages – and circumstances serve to remind us that we are but short-lived mayflies on this earth; and I loved this part, too. I enjoyed every bit of the writing – the big stories and line-by-line – and while I must recognise the particular nostalgic draw this had for me, I reckon it ought to appeal widely. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

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 I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.

Told from the perspective of James (Jim, Jimmy, Jimbo; a bookish lad destined to use his brains to rise above his working class roots), Mayflies opens at the beginning of the summer of 1986, as a group of Glaswegian guys, late-teens/early-twenties, plan to attend a punk rock music festival in Manchester. The group is bound by their neighbourhood, pop culture, and politics (these are mostly the kids of striking coal miners in Thatcher's Britain), but they are primarily bound by music – and the joy and abandon that music provided was transporting to read about. The undeniable leader of the group of friends was Tully Dawson, and James states that in his prime Tully “had innate charisma, a brilliant record collection, complete fearlessness in political argument, and he knew how to love you more than anybody else. Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you.” The trip to Manchester – all spare funds spent on tickets and a bus ride, the guys don't even know where they'll sleep – the banter between the friends, the joyful recklessness, the drinking and the dancing; everyone should have such an epic story in their past:

“Roll me on,” he said. He turned to us, all portly. “Onto the stage. Roll me.” Martyr for tunes, vampire for drink, Lincoln McCafferty crossed his arms over his chest and we rolled him towards the guitarist's fashionably buckled legs. In the universe of small humiliations, there can surely be few more effective for the guitar hero than the arrival at his feet of a rotund little Scottish guy high on Taboo. The guitarist, disturbed mid-song, shuffled and kicked as Limbo gripped on to his legs. I say gripped, I mean hugged, Limbo nodding in time to the music and gnawing the guy's jeans.

There is a wedding early in the second half of Mayflies and most of the friends are seeing each other for the first time in years. And just as with the titular insect, it can be hard to recognise the youthful forms in the adults we become; adolescence can appear to be an entirely different species. Even the music – as important as food and air at one time – has lost some of its importance:

It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You're not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It's there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you're half convinced it will soon come back. It's not the moves – the moves are there – but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo.

Much more than a wedding happens in the second half, and the change in tone between youthful abandon and adult responsibilities can be jarring without benefit of witnessing the years in between, but that's like a mayfly too – moulting from nymph to adult, the only thing that matters is how little time we have in the end (apparently, the female adult mayfly's lifespan can be as short as five minutes; sigh.) A few more quotes:

• Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience.

• You are a human being. And that's an unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.

• It occurred to me that though Clogs was young – he couldn't have been more than twenty-two – I thought of him as old, the way he leaned to one side, and smoked his cigarette like someone taking particular measures against pain.

Again, this felt written for me – I was backpacking in Europe in the summer of 1986 and met exactly these people; my friends back home were exactly these people – but no matter the reason, I found Mayflies to be perfectly satisfying.