the punk vibes of Scottish wounds

With The Ephemeralshis sixth novel, Andrew O’Hagan gives us the explosion of a punk work: the music is its beating heart, but the Scottish novelist makes his pages dance, above all, to a rhythm that is both tender and desperate, rough to the point ‘to the marrow, making confrontation a key word.

The “kids from Ayrshire” (southwest of Scotland) who make the world tremble The story carries loud and clear the demands of the working class. Their fathers worked in the mine, they in the factory. They are 18, 20 years old. Punk rock is their anchor, a class claim, but also a dissidence: Morrissey “arrives on stage brandishing a license, as if a new kind of belonging could be created on the basis of the feeling of exclusion”.

More than arts, songs, cinema, books are a language for them – eccentricity as self-invention. Tully, James, Limbo and the others spend the summer of 1986 remaking the world through their verbal jousts. A way of grappling with the future, of projecting their hopes onto the screen of possibilities, obscured by the repression of the miners’ strike of 1985, which only resulted in layoffs.

The first part of the novel floats, levitating, capturing at its highest degree of exaltation the trance of this little gang electrified by Tully, a dark angel of provocative effrontery. Their weekend in Manchester, for the festival “of the tenth summer”is an acme, which unleashes an extralucid radicality: one-upmanship of absurdo-political, surreal and subversive hypotheses, jubilant shortcuts – and if it was the goal of Kenny Dalglish which had, terribly inevitable, provoked the Thatcher revolution? What if it was Fred Astaire who was at the origin of Brexit, at the end of an infernal spiral?

Terrible news

This aesthetic of collage, of short circuit, branches out into a romantic sample: fallow consciousnesses collide with film tirades. This comparison of dimensions – reality and its reflection in fiction; an event and its invisible consequences – resonates even in the narrative structure, tightening around Tully and James. In a hair-raising cut-up, 1986 ends with a backfire “the queen is dead” the Smiths, lyrics “silly, romantic, mature and British” that the boys sing as they jump shoulder to shoulder, to catapult them into the autumn of 2017. Tully then became a teacher in the deprived areas of Glasgow, James a writer – the most optimistic versions of themselves. Bearer of terrible news, the first contacts the second to invest him with a mission, a demonstration as dazzling as it is tragic that the reverberation of childhood friendships never ceases to project its aura. But it also places an ambivalent responsibility on James. As a young man, he “divorced from his parents”entering by emotional transfusion into Tully’s family. Does he, for this reason, have a charge of soul? Tully believes that as a writer and lifelong friend, James has the power to imagine the scenario that alone will offer a way out of his asphyxiated life.

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