Andrew O’Hagan and Edmund Gordon: 'Mayflies'

hi welcome to the first event uh to happen in the london review bookshop since the lockdown earlier this year an exciting moment i'm edmund gordon i'm thrilled to be here with andrea hagen to discuss his new novel mayflies um andrew is one of the country's most brilliant writers of both fiction and non-fiction uh many of you watching this may know him from his um essays in the london review of books on subjects ranging from the killing of james bulger and the fire at grenfell tower through lad mags and susan boyle to bitcoin and the dark web as a novelist he's received so many accolades that we wouldn't have time to talk about much else if i listed them all um but they include the la times book prize for uh be near me and the james p black memorial prize for personality um everything that andrew writes is distinguished by his beautiful couple style and his deep humanity and mayflies is his most intimate book the date it traces the friendship between holly dawson and the narrator jimmy collins over the course of 30 years the first half of the novel takes place when the main characters are 18 and it follows them on a life defining in some ways trip to manchester um and then the second part takes place 30 years later when jimmy the narrator receives a call from tully uh saying that he's been diagnosed with terminal cancer um it's uh for my money it's the best novel about the magic of youth and the terrible speed with which it disappears to have appeared in many many years why don't we start with a reading from you yeah absolutely delighted um so i hope everybody's hearing is okay i'm going to read from a part of the novel uh which is the kind of centrosome moment in that youthful journey where the boys from glasgow um end up in manchester at the concert of their lives the festival of the 10th summer that's the 10th anniversary of punk rock uh and one of the bands that they love are the smiths and finally they appear on stage and there's a kind of moment of complete clarity for this crowd of boys the band was at its height romantic and wronged and fierce and sublime with haircuts like agendas morrissey came brandishing a license a whole manner of permission as if a new kind of belonging could be made from feeling left out like nobody knew you like he did time takes nothing away from it those thousands of heartened teenagers taking the roof off and giving out your gawky front man from stratford holly found me and pushed me down to the stage over the speakers the sound was scratchy but every words and every guitar like felt like a statement only they could make and only we could hear those songs rolling from the stage to irrigate our lives that's what it's all about tully shouted and he kissed my cheek as we sang i could see limbo up the front whirling out of his skin holding up a smoke and shouting about panic on the streets of carlisle then he was nearers and wagging his finger and time to the music a wonderful look on his face singing about a vicar about joan of arc and throwing plastic tumblers into the air our hair was soaking wet the ayrshire boys appeared from all corners of the hall and we hugged and the music stored and it seemed like a huge animation of the things that mattered to us then pips and hog limbo and tully and clogs 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 by the clear-eyed young i think that this is the first time you've really written about the experience of being a fan about what that's like about what celebrity looks like from the outside and i suppose i wonder i mean it seems very psychologically important to these boys in the novel that being a fan it seems like it's the they have quite grim home lives they you know they're in broken homes they have sick and unemployed parents um and this is their means of escape in a way um i mean is that how that makes perfect sense to me you know that's really one of the core values of the novel this one um is that those boys find their identity in the group and they find it in relation to these famous ants some of whom by the way were only famous for about 10 minutes you know fans like the bodines or the x or some of the bands that i quote i mean i don't know about you who's younger than me but even people my age might say who the hell are they i have to admit to not having heard of all the bands yeah you might have heard of the fall of the spring yeah another nostalgic element a time when morrissey was someone who left-wing young people could that's right who was bearable and more than bearable i mean somebody you would have emulated i mean sadly no longer but that's again a message about what time does you know the faith that those boys have is a kind of group faith and the their own transportability if you like that as you say they're all boys with a pretty harsh background and and real difficulties back home some of which they share in the novel and it being that enriches the friendship in the sharing that's part of the story but um you're right fandom becomes a kind of uh a group habit with them and it was so like that you know that we felt that people who didn't like the bands we like had something wrong with them morally you know the fandom in a novel like the contemporary novel like this might be understood to work the way that romance works in george eliot that the currency of that the shared experience of it uh the hankering for it and ultimately the resolution of it uh for george eliot was the beating heart of the human problem in the novel well for for my generation uh and and i think even more complicatedly complicatedly for the one after me but fame becomes a kind of because of the technology a self-producing thing in instagram and social media are indeed these are platforms in which young people can seek their international personal fame and fandom simultaneously so i've been interested in writing about those things i think since the beginning as you say as well as i mean you know having quite difficult domestic lives nothing much is expected of these boys there's uh there's a great line early on about how the nuns teach them prepare them for a world in which piety might be a replacement for not having basic mathematic knowledge and yet they all do escape that world i mean all of the central characters in it they they to a greater or lesser extent do more than is expected than we see in the second year what is it about them do you think that that's a fact you know um that you didn't get your raise on that you know you didn't get your purpose in life from the teachers necessarily although interestingly jimmy does he has won the famous one good teacher who pulls him over uh the wall into a life of freedom really she believes in him in a way that his parents don't know how to but it was typical among those boys that and girls did they shared the thing which was that they didn't look to their elders for how a lesson and how to live they invented it among themselves and again that's a core value in the novel i mean the response to the novel has been really heartening and one of the things that people come back to me with is that we've been looking for an explanation of how clever young people in britain made their lives and i think that they did make their lives this was a time of thatcherism those communities that these boys come from are being shattered at that moment the minor strike happened you know the year before the the first half of the novel's events begin and those these boys are full of a sense that the future has been sort of damned by the political order in britain at that time and yet they're so clever and so in touch with each other and that's the important thing for me there's a cliche about working-class people in this country that persists that they're gloomy that they're held back that they're endlessly sort of inarticulate you know you hear these things said in the right-wing press in fact some of the cleverest people i have met in my life were the young people i grew up with they had irony they'd film references they they read novels they loved their music with a with an understanding and a sense of purpose that i've scarcely met since i mean i don't want to idealize them they were in some ways broken and some of them you know were suffering and the parental situation was often quite extreme but what they did was they invented their lives as surely in a different context as this of oscar wilde did they made it up and the making up of it with that brilliant soundtrack became the core material for me rendered that brilliantly i mean the the wit and the articular see all these young people but i mean it struck me the escape is a sort of quite a prominent theme in the book but yeah but really the escape i mean what we see of their later lives is in fact what the narrator calls violence and death i mean we don't see the glorious lives that they've escaped to we see the things they can't escape to that come at the end yeah and the real escape is in the present of their cultures it is that weakened in manchester is there friendships with one another that that distance between the first half the youthful uh element and then 30 years later when the call comes that the leading guy the front man the great friend tully um has got terminal cancer i took a risk with that and it's a technical risk and it's basically the risk is this i wanted the reader to do all the work about their life's achievements in their own head and to find it as it were in their own understanding when we meet the boys again 30 years later they're fully they're fully in possession of themselves we still hear the echoes and the language and the references and the connection to who we know they were because we've already read of them but no it's a thing a novel can do that's very hard to just say in film or you can just close the page turn it and it says 30 years later and here they are it's like life in that way you can meet somebody in a train station that you haven't seen for 30 years when you're like me and you're in your early 50s that can happen it does happen and you see the traces of who they used to be in their language and on their face and what they're talking about um but you also see other things including the inevitability that all the escape in the world didn't cause us to escape from one thing and that is that we're all going to the same station in the end and again that doesn't have to be a gloomy thought that's just a thing that novels must deal in that they're about lives and exuberance and you pack a novel if you can at whatever level and in whatever way with life but there must also always be what so bellow called the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all and that's death and even in a book that was full of joy and jokes and music and belief like this and it was about escape as you rightly say but there's no escaping ultimately from what fate might bring and the novel tries to conjure with those problems it's a belovean problem to me you know how do you have a full life in the midst of a certainty that death is coming and the novel dramatizes that is that sense that you talk about that people endure that they remain as as old people the people they were in their youth in some sense even if a diluted version i mean is that something that naturally happens or is that something that has to be worked out and that these i think it's a virtue in people i must say i'm prejudiced in favor of that kind of virtue i've always liked uh the notion that i mean people can fall out they can grow distant they can move into different lives they can vote for different political parties but i love the idea that there is a there are essential connections between friends say uh as opposed let's not talk at this point about family connection or romantic connection that might bring its own particularly it does bring its own particular poetry and problem problematics but in friendship especially to reduce again to male friendship i think i've always been a fan of the notion that there are consistencies that can as it were overarch any of the difficulties and differences and distances that can come in life i mean there's a kind of idealism in that for me i mean i wrote about soho recently in the lrb and i think threaded through that essay was a strong notion that um knowing how to behave with your friends and not knowing how to be a good friend to them over the years is a kind of an unexplored but nevertheless a proper contentious virtue i've always been quite proud of the fact that i'm still in touch with the friends i had when i was a teenager and that wasn't a hard battle that wasn't crawling over broken glass to maintain that at all it was utterly natural to me i love my friends and i want to grow with them and in some cases in very many cases we are living very different lives now but the connection is unbreakable to me then the narrator the um the andrew again character if i may yeah in the uh novel travels at a greater distance than any of his peers and it's implied that that's largely to do with the english teacher uh mrs o'connor as she is called um and something i really admired was how the sense of joy and excitement um with which you wrote about gigs in manchester hearing um the uh play exactly the same sense of excitement was brought to descriptions of after school study sessions with god that's how sad they are did you have a mrs there was indeed um and she actually died the same year as my old friend who inspired the novel i got a letter from her husband to tell me that um that she had remembered our friendship by a friendship as a pupil with this english teacher who you know in a you know comprehensive secondary school in the middle of a housing estate 25 miles outside glasgow literally and figuratively kept the lights on for me to prepare me uh for university i mean i came from a big family of boys my three older brothers hadn't stayed on at school they got no qualifications they didn't go to university so a chance came for me to do that it was mainly through her and she literally stayed on late with me alone in the class going through anthony and cleopatra and wbas and thomas hardy's novels preparing me for uh the hiles as we call them in scotland to get into university that didn't come from my home life that came from her in 30 odd years later you know when she died there was a tremendous upswelling for me of gratitude but also of looking back thinking again as i like the novel to be it was about what one human being's existence does for another how impacts on another and that can be romantic it can be educational it can be to do with friendship or a financial relationship any number but it's always for me at the core of it and that woman was based on a woman who actually made a decision you know to not go home of an evening and have a supper and be with her husband and have a glass of wine but to sit in a classroom with a grubby you know 16 17 year old taking him through uh these authors and trying to light a fire under his life you know it's the literature was less important to the boys to the group in general yeah than music and films they quote film constantly i mean is that um in your life in the formation of your sensibility do you think music and film had the same impact or a greater impact certainly as much when i was younger i mean i was very bookish in one of those of library haunting shadows who couldn't get enough of reading and it was a kind of uh even at the time i knew that it was my passport out and i don't mean to suggest that there's only one arrow in working-class life and it is out i know plenty of people including all my friends and including my brothers they didn't go out in that way they still live in the area where we grew up by and large and you know have you know actually satisfying and full lives but for me and i can only speak about me and the character based on me in this novel there was always a high fence to vault over that was just my nature you know in so many writers lives if you look at them you know whether it be you know as it were dorothy parker or you know um you know thomas hardy himself you know there's this urge to to remake your life and to start on your own terms again somewhere else there's always a paris there's always a new york there's always a london you know and it's not that those places are you know deep with virtue are better than where you came from but it's just that there's a kind of anonymity there when you're starting out and i came to london off the bus you know all those years ago you know fresh from that world of great friendship and very vivid experiences as a teenager but into a kind of anonymity and started again some writers especially i say writers could be artists we could just be individuals it's in your nature to do that it was in mine and it's in uh james's this the narrator of the book has that i think probably from childhood i feel that having addressed your i mean i think every novel you've written am i right about this other than math is partially at least set in the west of scotland yeah do you feel that having addressed your own youth so directly in a novel you sort of come to the end of that road or will you continue to return to this i mean interestingly it's not always my youth uh that i feel moved to sit in that landscape i mean i've set you know another like be near me is set in that landscape but it's a contemporary novel and the elimination is set in that landscape too but you're right my childhood has come back also in the esses you know that i'm not afraid to sort of divulge yet another absorbed strand of childhood i've always felt that one day i would write a series of memoir based books i certainly will i mean it's available to me and it is my material so i don't run from it i'm very happy that that's the case but in answer to your question i do feel that i feel two things about the airship of my books uh one is that i'll never leave it that for me it is as it were as faulkner had his imagined county you know as uh you know the new jersey of roth was it's always there as a kind of uh constant music it's the it's the landscape of my imagination in a primary way that doesn't mean to say hello with set books or stories or essays there but it will always come back i think in the way that it does in life in the way that it does in my dreams i mean i always dream about yeshua it's somehow it's the fictive landscape for me and although i could easily set one of these family dramas in skagness or in you know uh east ham you know and i know london now as well as i knew the landscape probably better than the landscape of my childhood but something of the poetry of robert barnes something of the novels of that county something of the language on the tongue is just eternally there for me so i will always return to it but also you're quite right there will be some time i think against i mean could be many years before i write a straightforward uh you know as it were memoiristic novel state in your shirt i don't see that happening now for a long time because i've so been dominated by that feeling for this book because am i right in thinking that this you were in fact at work on another novel huge novel yeah for six years i mean for caledonian road and it's a what henry james once somebody said what are you working on he said a huge grotesque epic of london society i've decided to adopt that that's what i've been working on for a long time as a as a novel about the way we live now in contemporary britain in six years i've been so uh researching in some sort of you know slightly mildly in factories and polo matches and in the royal court signs of industries looking for the story of the relationship between as it were immigrants and rich people in london today and with all these grand changes in our society happening at the same time i've always been hopeful that i could write a big 19th century style novel and that's what i've been working on for a long time but i just paused in the middle of that to write mayflies i felt that it was urgent that i wrote that book now um i think that the first question has come through it says achille fan kylie yes come on like football team oh right um i have to say that i have affection for kylie as our team because that was the local team along with air united have to say so just to give a shout out to them as well but i come from a celtic loving family i mean there are people brewing now silently beyond my earshot because of course as soon as you mention glasgow celtic you need to immediately mention the equal and wonderful opposites rangers fc that i grew up in a west coast of scotland family devoted to celtic and actually that immigrant irish team in glasgow fascinate me you know and my brother's a season ticket holder so i need to um doff my cap to celtic first but kelly great team they were the local noise um it shows me that football is doesn't play a part in the novel but that is another area of sort of both working-class um um achievement and ambition it's really interesting that actually that um football was much bigger these are what this answers that previous question too about why fiction i mean in life the boys were much more into football than they are in the book i mean the central character as people who discovered in the novel is describes an addict there's a scene on a bus on the way to manchester well they're having a hilarious to me conversation very much drawn from the kind of things they would say but they're arguing about the best and the worst scottish goals ever in your own weather uh the the famous archie gemmell go go against holland in the world cup gave rise to thatcherism because there was a nationalist moment coming from that goal and the comedy of that was very much to do with football and their love of it um jimmy in the book can listen to that as i do and repeat it as i do but it wasn't central to his you know experience i wasn't a football lover um but if but in the course of the boot the freedom represented by football for working-class boys lives in the story right up to the very last sentence and i i think i had to sort of i had to bring that about a beautiful image that it ends on um about second the second half of the novel there's i mean as well as seeing i think all of the characters age and see all of the characters they said sort of you know retaining some of who they were but also having it diluted there's a lovely and horrifying line at one stage about um they're all at the wedding and they said that some of them have forgotten how to hold pints yeah there's um i haven't noticed that by the way in men of a certain age that yeah you know you know they've been at home with the children for a long time and they've the social life is a kind of uh nostalgic experience it's something that they haven't been to a gig for years and i went to a gig that um in glasgow while i was researching the book and i noticed a lot of middle-aged men standing with a pint glass of like balanced on the palm of their hand like that and i thought they haven't been out for a while you know all that gripping of pints yeah had gone just things like that that sort of interest me you know just observations but um i'm sure it's not true of every guy of that age but it was a sort of it's the sort of um thing i like to invite the readers attention on to is how we our habits and our um obsessions change so much if you're a guy who's been at home or a woman who's been at home with children for 15 or 20 years then your sense of going into a damp sweaty student hall somewhere in sucky hall street isn't all that or perhaps for some people it is hi andrew do you think that male friendships have been given short shrift in our novels it seems to me that as a society we're not great on expressing the value of male friendship and this could potentially contribute to the rising concerns about male mental health who sent that in do we know jamie molot yeah that's a nice question i mean the i think this is a this is a weird moment for men um and they're a sense of themselves i mean it's quite rightly too by the way i mean i'm not you know bleeding at all um but you know one of the things that we haven't quite worked out how to do is uh is pay attention to very necessary uh demands for freedom without diminishing the freedom of others who are also there at the same time and i think that um in some ways it's quite an unfashionable subject male friendship at the moment with me too and everything and as i say support me too it's absolutely right this moment is right for this there's a reckoning time's up as they say on patterns of male behavior and assumptions i mean of course we agree with that but what i wouldn't want to see is that male experience is suddenly found uninteresting as a result no intellectual life is so fashionable in that way you know that suddenly um you know the lives of you know billions of men or middle-aged men or white men is suddenly found uninteresting because there are other things to think about i think a good liberal tolerant society should train itself to think about them all simultaneously and together and as a togetherness that as it were addressing this equilibriums should be able to be done in a way that just doesn't create as it were new unfairnesses i mean that's what i mean about um it's an unfashionable topic at the moment but um i'm not afraid of that i mean it didn't halt me for one second in writing the novel i mean this this was about human beings and i found myself in a position to write that book i certainly wasn't going to you know make it a different more pleasing more politically correct but it can populate it with um different sorts of characters that would be cynical and indeed insulting you know that was the experience i chose to capture with this book and i'm delighted i'd be delighted to read alternative versions of male behavior and male togetherness whatever they occur i think you've spoken previously about uh some advice that norman mailer gave you about how you must never be reduced to the kind of person who just has uh the right opinions yeah i mean i think that's absolutely crucial for uh any writer any professional writer who doesn't understand that is in the wrong game that you're not in the business of selling your certainties to your readers your readers are too intelligent for that by the way i mean i've had my moments of being upgraded for trying to be too objective or trying to give voice to the the unpopular view and so on um in some of my stories i mean i started my life at the london review writing a story about how we should feel pity for the boys who murdered james bulger in liverpool i made the argument that there were three victims in that case the dead boy primarily but also the two 10 year old boys who did it and i was met with huge consternation in some quarters especially in the right-wing press because ambiguity or inclusiveness of that sort is often thought to be suspect i mean i grew up as a thing you probably did with a settlement of respect for orwell's notion of opposing group think but in journalism today opposing group think can seem like an agenda to some people and it you can find yourself accused of also all manner of uh you know evils just for simply trying to give your readers a sense of the size of the argument the size of the debate and also the perspectives on the event i mean certainly that was true in the case of grenfell that some people were absolutely delighted that somebody had finally tried to open the aperture and other people were absolutely horrified and you have to live with that as a writer it's your responsibility not as norman miller rightly said to just try call the right notes and show everybody how right on you are i mean that's disgraceful i think no it makes it all the more important that's the thing to do but also something which requires courage which of course in politics is more stable you and i have had students said and the idea of sending your students out into the world as potentially professional writers and saying you know just write all the pleasing things you can yeah and you'll get a publisher and you'll get an agent and you'll get fans and people like you on twitter until they don't you know that would be a monstrous misdirection i think you know old-fashioned as it makes sound i mean i don't know that it's courageous i think it's just professional i mean i think it does take courage to face the kind of crap that i've you know that you had after your grenfell piece from some people i think it does take courage to i think you've got to be ready for it and ready not to be broken by it i mean they certainly had a perspective um but they didn't want me to have one those people and you know they couldn't believe that i hadn't been as it were brought up by the right wing because simply because i've given some air time to the accused but we live in a system even effort of any basic belief in a justice system that we live under that the accused must have their moment too that's the fundamental of our legal system and our journalistic system the right to reply the voluntary review just simply followed a rather traditional ambition with that piece which was to give the complexity all the air time it required and it required 65 000 words in my view in the end and there were many views being expressed and actually none of them very precisely my view my view was kind of non-existent in the end it was about trying to give a proper picture to people and that's true as true of the writing of a novel as of writing an essay or writing a haiku i imagine is don't uh don't stack the case one way or the other um it's not uh it's not dignifying and uh and it's not observant about how your readers really ultimately require the freedom to make up their own mind i i've never read a courageous haiku but otherwise i'm with you all the way the nate is young we've got some more questions will burt says hi andrew i'm from a working class area in scotland as well we were taught to be aspirational even in thatcher's time our music of escape flash dreaming was rave do you think there is a lack of that type of aspiration now or is it always how we feel looking back i don't think it's a matter of looking back again a good question because it's so i mean we could do another on that we don't have it but i mean briefly um i mean that rape culture the the the question i was part of was an enormous uplifting moment for i was young enough to be part of that i was only 20 in 1988 when you know suddenly boys like us who'd been wearing sort of black denims with turnips and doc martens and so you know leather jackets suddenly were in raves the music changed we dropped the guitars all the guitars suddenly started becoming part of us at chicago housebeat and we absolutely loved it and we participated in it we took the drugs we uh bought into the new music and the new culture wildly and again that felt like a liberation that's the thing about popular culture that's worth the candle is that people who don't really understand or pay attention to think it's just kind of ephemeral youth culture that doesn't mean anything but i think we might agree that in the last 40 years or so or 50 years pop culture has come front and center in people's experience of living and a novel that defies that and pretends that high culture you know as it were an understanding of the philosophical and the economic and the the the the high culture of the serious novel can't be polluted by rave culture or loving bands or the camaraderie that can exist in a sweaty hall where thousands of boys are all and girls are rushing towards the stage i defy that i mean it's it's it's actually almost a truth of the period i've lived through as a writer as the popular culture is now as important as anything so i think the questioner will find that as we speak there are teenagers planning their freedom plotting their weekend plotting their character based on what they're listening to the politics you know whether it be extinction rebellion whether it be resisting the sort of grotesque you know operations of facebook whether it be you know looking at the government you know uh who are supposed to be serving them and thinking they're more chaotic and more full of untruths than any government's ever been and they will use their music in their culture to galvanize their feelings about that and move forward as a tribe i'm all into it and it's happening so i don't think it's nostalgic at all i think it's a persistent thing in human life uh we've questioned from julian lewis who asks will lockdown be part of andrew's great baggy 19th century novel on the way we live now yes yes it will because i mean we're now in a period where you know if you're going to be the kind of novelist who is trying to wrap her arms around the condition of britain now then the condition of britain now has been possibly altered for 100 years by what's happened uh with this pandemic you know not just looking at the economy but or the education system there's a whole generation of young people who you that their attendance you know their a level results that that's a generation you're talking about almost and that's that's been deeply affected by this but also i think it's really changed our sense of vulnerability as human beings i think our relationship to death into vulnerability to see young women and young men are perfectly healthy individuals being filled by this has brought us right up against something which the novel if i may say tries to deal in which is the the proximity of that common disaster that we know is death i think covert is has brought us right up against that and in addition to that our sense of community has been altered by it how do we look after each other how we support our industries i mean even supporting those restaurants through difficult times that was unthinkable from a tory government only five years ago you know that suddenly british senate sounds like somebody who's he sounds like somebody from you know santa and new labour and somebody slightly even more to the left than that yeah you know it's it's it's a momentous time so any novel that's looking to depict the state of the nation we need to i i just i just just we've just been talking about um avoiding sort of beyond certainties is there not a parallel thing that makes you want to avoid topics that other novelists will be all over or is there not i mean i just i just feel i mean i i kind of dread the glut of lockdown novels that we're going to get i'm with you on this and the key word i think in your question that is topics if they're topics right it's a mistake if they're part of the fabric of everyday life i mean the word the i mean as it were covered 19 as a as a word or a phrase or whatever it is might never be mentioned by me in a big novel but as it were the ether has been affected by it and how we move and how we and how time was people might talk about before 2020 and after 2020 in the novel that might just be have been inculcated by the characters at some level so it's not a topic you know you shouldn't be sitting around the table talking about you know what it was like for them and lockdown necessarily but somehow the novel will be full of it in the sense that you know um i don't know victorian novelists uh books were often filled with as it were the fume of industrial change they weren't sitting around in a pub discussing i mean sometimes crudely in dickens you'll get somebody walking on and or even the sainted george eliot will have something about agrarian change or other reform act that will be sort of absolutely presented on the page the russians are always a bit less nervous about that they'll bring on political argument in the 19th century novel um so i would avoid that certainly bringing topicality right into i mean there's so much topicality at the moment in british life i mean brexit you could absolutely you could wreck your novel with probability at the moment so it's just that we have as it is in life you know it's woven into the fabric of how people are experiencing time i think we've probably got time for two more questions um we've got one from scott hay who says hi andrew do you think that males are losing their male friendships in this isolation period in comparison to female friendships and how do you think this might affect all of our friendships when the catalyst of covert conversation is gone going to be interesting that actually um i've been doing a little kind of study among um individuals about how the social life has been altered by this and all that although it's a cliche to think only men go to the pub i mean it's not the 1950s and plenty of women go to the pub and plenty of men go to the pub with women it's you know and uh indeed it's it's it's the categories are endless and we listen to you know how people define themselves and go out socially now and exist um is is in a massive state of change i don't i don't think that male experience will be harmed any more than women's although i do think that that idea of just being on the street and bumping into people and stuff hanging out the hanging out thing has already changed you see that we people walk around you in the street now i was in the park today and just so that everybody's doing a kind of different way of relating to each other especially so it's hard to answer the question this question in terms of what will it mean to the specific you know to me to men in particular i think that was already changing to be honest i mean my father's way of relating to other men was just a universe away from yours and mine i mean my father would never have gone to dinner with a man on his own you know i wouldn't hesitate you know but all of that that's not just a class thing it just wasn't and he had no female friends my father wasn't the most old-fashioned person in the world but he was of his time he met men in national service you know and they were the men he sort of hung on to and he met them in institutions he wouldn't have gone to dinner with them on his own and he wouldn't have he'd gone to the pub with them or smoked with them or you know talked about problems in a kind of very fenced off part of life but i think i think it's already oh it's already over the idea of men being a sort of cabal on their own maybe football fans feel different they may be sport there's a world still where men go to be with men i wouldn't know how to answer that no do that interesting well the only sport that i know about is tennis which is probably the most gender equal sport of all of them yeah right last question from madeleine murray who says hi andrew with so much senses of group belonging music football even a sense of being lumped together what do you think happens to male friendship uh when these influences or structures change or fall away do you think it is different now compared to the time period of the novel it's definitely different uh to the period of the first half of the novel that's to say 1986. um [Music] i mean one of the things i loved about my male friends is that they were always quite um open in a way that not all the men that then was one of the things we had in common not just the music and the films everything but they were quite camp and quite funny about they made camp jokes they made uh they made they were looser in their sexuality in a way and i think of those guys as almost kind of harbingers of change that they were because none of our fathers were like that i mean i don't called our fathers it was about the rigidity of those old socialist uh you know those men who understand stood their role in economic and political and sexual terms as a kind of rigidity then my mates weren't like that they were always sort of sending themselves up they were theatrical they were quite funny i mean i never felt like an exception among those guys i'm talking to you now the way we all talk to each other then that there was a sort of openness an irony a theatricality a pantomimic quality you see it in the novel that endlessly quoting um sending each other up sending themselves up and that was so my point is that that kind of old-fashioned masculinity was already under attack in my youth and i've just watched it actually get better and better and better to the point where um you know the idea of an absolute died in the wool male chauvinist pig just walking through a pub and being applauded for being that is now not it's not going to happen you know and as i said before i mean as a father of a 16 year old daughter she would find that kind of person completely absurd it's not that they don't exist in places they do and there are cultures where they're still dominant that are still unfairnesses and deep-seated endemic uh you know injustices based around those fixed positions but they're much less fixed than they were and the normal set of charts that in a way thank you very much andrew because there's nothing inside uh it's been great fun

Channel: London Review Bookshop

Views: 2,514

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

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Id: ESfilpt_09s

Length: 43min 58sec (2638 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020