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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : O : O'Hagan, Andrew
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In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty.Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."
The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart
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Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.
O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough
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At present, Sudan suffers from a horrendous civil war: 1.4 million people have died here, while many more have been displaced. The Weekenders is a collection of fiction and non-fiction that takes an impressive array of British writers into the heart of Sudan's conflict, shedding light on this frequently ignored tragedy (profits from the book are going to help the relief effort).Here is a mysterious tale from Alex Garland, WF Deedes' debut piece of fiction, and--the centrepiece of the collection--a disturbing novella by Irvine Welsh in which Welsh's trademark skewering of the vileness of human urges is counterbalanced by his fluid prose and the story's troubling setting. Paradoxically, however, the shortest piece of fiction--Andrew O'Hagan's Fish River--is also the most impressive, as O'Hagan succeeds with brilliance and grace in conveying the thought patterns of a Sudanese child whose mother has been raped and enslaved.
But although the setting is grim, the horror underscoring the collection is leavened by perhaps the funniest thing that Tony Hawks has written, as he recounts his doomed attempts to compose music in a war-ravaged town, and--more seriously--the moral dilemmas which arise when rich Europeans descend upon war-torn Africa. These problems are fleshed out more fully by Victoria Glendinning in the final piece, as she considers the ethics of NGOs and big business working in Sudan.
This is an illuminating and thought-provoking book which raises disturbing questions for us all. In an alarmingly prescient fiction on the American bombing of Khartoum in 1998 in their first search for Osama bin Laden, Giles Foden describes the response of the CIA operative in the region:
"Everything was screwed up. Sometimes it blew [his] head what a tangled world it was that he existed in."
--Toby Green
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In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty.Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."
The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart
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Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.
O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough
-
-
-
Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.
O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough
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Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.
O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough
-
-
-
In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty.
Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."
The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart
-
Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.
The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.
O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough
-
In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty.Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers."
The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan Stewart