How This Theme Works: Transition in Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan

In the first paragraph of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies, published in 2020, the author activates the novel’s primary theme: transition and the lack thereof.

We’re in Scotland. It’s 1986, and Thatcherism is at its peak. We see a defeated and embittered father wander away from his son’s soccer game to stare forlornly at the Firth of Clyde, where the Clyde River flows into an estuary before dumping its waters off the coast of Scotland.

Tully Dawson made himself new to the world, and ripe for the glories of that summer, by showing he was unlike his father. It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it. But I think it always bothered Tully that Woodbine couldn’t cheer him on when he came by the football field to watch the game. The old man would only shake his head in a know-all way and stare at the Firth of Clyde with an injured look. Tully had named him after the cigarettes; they all had their nicknames, those reluctant fathers. They sat at home opening cans of lager and cursing our Saturday nights. 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. Our cheeks burned and we watched him walk towards the unstained light of the harbour.

An estuary, or firth, is a place of transition where fresh water mixes with salt. Here, relatively narrow and constrained rivers, themselves symbols of change, pass into open, unbounded oceans, symbols of creation.

Woodbine is a miner crushed by his union’s capitulation to the Thatcher government, and he wears that injured look because the firth represents a transition he couldn’t achieve, his union’s strike movement lost to the era’s neoliberal order. While we need to read on to get these background details, the image alone is enough to immediately imbue the first sentence with more meaning. Tully, who we later learn is twenty years old and works in a factory, won’t settle for his father’s trampled middle age. He’ll relate to the ocean, not the harbour.

All throughout the first chapter, O’Hagan works to build on this image and conjure this theme. Our narrator (for the whole book) is Jimmy, who, along with every other member of their friend group, idolizes Tully. He’s speaking to us from some point in the future, telling us that Tully, who back then played guitar, later transitioned to drummer, which, depending on your sensibilities, is either a step up or down. Jimmy also marvels at Tully’s green eyes and then tells us that, guess what, his dad has green eyes too, finally underscoring that Tully “had the leader thing, when he was young.”

After thoroughly drawing Tully’s character, Jimmy turns to his own, revealing that his parents abandoned him, his dad “in search of himself” and his mother to avoid the resulting responsibilities of single parenthood—more adults who didn’t quite transition into the models of at least modest success we might expect. We learn that an English teacher has captured Jimmy’s imagination, as well as his ambition, and we understand that he’ll transition out of his working-class present into something more ivy league.

There are many other first-chapter nods to theme as well (for example, the boys have a hard-partying friend nicknamed Limbo), such that in subsequent chapters, O’Hagan can service it in passing, making brief reference to life “changing in the Soviet Union” or the failure of the Scottish devolution referendum in 1979, which would’ve seen England decentralize power to its tartan territory. Having first established the theme on a personal level, O’Hagan can effortlessly apply it to the political, suggesting that all of life is either change or failed change, the latter its own sort of change.

This early devotion to theme also serves to offset the too-familiar coming-of-age trope in which a bookish observer recounts the antics of a somewhat doomed high-school hero. Despite that dynamic, Mayflies isn’t really a coming-of-age story about a group of friends getting epically wasted at a concert in Manchester, which is the arc of the first half. Far more engaging, its second half is set about thirty years later and revolves around a different but no less impactful life transition, one that mortality, in one form or another, holds in store for us all.

As writers and editors, we can look to this opening chapter for guidance on how to imbue stories with meaning—and imbue them early—while still minding our cast and setting. We can learn to use tools like symbolism and character foils to quickly tell our readers what our stories are about below the surface. And the benefits of this hard work are clear. Once we’re able to make a theme take root, we can set it on our windowsill like a plant in a pot, watering it only occasionally to keep the foliage lush and green.