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Andrew O'HaganAndrew O'Hagan
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Critical perspective
BiographyAndrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1968 and read English at the University of Strathclyde. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Essays, Fiction, Non-fiction
BibliographyThe Missing Picador, 1995 Our Fathers Faber and Faber, 1999 The End of British Farming Profile Books, 2001 The Weekenders (contributor) Ebury Press, 2001 New Writing 11 (co-editor with Colm Toibin) Picador, 2002 Personality Faber and Faber, 2003 The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta (editor) Ebury Press, 2004 Be Near Me Faber and Faber, 2006 A Night Out with Robert Burns (editor) Canongate, 2008 The Atlantic Ocean Faber and Faber, 2008 The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Faber and Fabe, 2010
Prizes and awards1995 Esquire Award (shortlist) The Missing 1995 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year (shortlist) The Missing 1995 Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award (shortlist) The Missing 1996 BAFTA Calling Bible John 1999 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Our Fathers 1999 Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist) Our Fathers 2000 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist) Our Fathers 2000 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize Our Fathers 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (shortlist) Our Fathers 2003 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) Personality
Critical PerspectiveFrom the beginning of his writing career Andrew O’Hagan has pushed at the conventional limits of literary genre, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, documentary and journalism. What characterises all his work however, is a resolute political and historical engagement. Though particularly perceptive in detailing the bittersweet experiences of 1970s childhood and the layered community histories of both rural and urban Scotland in the post-war era, his writing has most force in confronting British ideological fragmentation, and the many questions surrounding Scotland’s troubled claims for a coherent national identity.
The Missing (1995) shows O’Hagan’s instinct to shape life as fiction. Though factual in its basis, this account of the children and adults who inexplicably disappeared in Britain over four decades delves imaginatively into the background details of their lives, engaging with distressed families and painstaking detective inquiries, and speculating on the ghostly nature of disappearance. Referred to by police as ‘mispers’, these runaways, amnesiacs, or victims of crime remain shrouded in mystery: ‘The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead.’
The Missing is given added poignancy by the author’s autobiographical identification with the children who have disappeared. In a prefatory ‘book’, O’Hagan details his own childhood in Scotland’s Clydeside, tracing his extended family’s recent past and its links to the area’s shipbuilding industry. He describes too, his own grandfather’s disappearance, at sea during a wartime naval battle, as the first in a chain of connection from one vanishing to another. Not only people but entire streets and districts of Glasgow itself have disappeared in the reconstructions of the post-war era. Such losses can only be recovered through family memories, for as O’Hagan explains, ‘[p]eople didn’t move around much in Glasgow, or, at least, they didn’t in the generations previous to my own, which has decanted and redeveloped in the usual modern ways. So to properly know your own family in an old city is to know something of the history of the city itself.’
Glasgow thus joins the lists of the ‘missing’, and the book seeks partially to restore its obscure identity to view, teasing it out from under the new urban developments grafted onto its rural outskirts. ‘In my own time’, writes O’Hagan, ‘because of what’s happened, because of the death of the big industries, we’ve been given to singing a hymn to Glasgow’s industrial might’. But the human costs of that strength are also recognised, in the harsh physical conditions endured by labourers in the dockyards, and in the sectarian violence erupting between Scotland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, a resentment which fuels a continuing tension between its rival football teams, Celtic and Rangers.
The development and decline of Scotland’s urban landscape also forms the thematic core of O’Hagan’s subsequent novel, Our Fathers (1999). The story told by the main character, Jamie Bawn, is of a Glasgow childhood blighted by the violence of his alcoholic father, Robert. When home becomes unbearable, Jamie leaves to live with his grandfather Hugh, an old-fashioned socialist whose life has been dedicated to post-war urban redevelopment and the provision of affordable tower-block housing. Now, years later, Hugh is dying, his civic dream turned to nightmare by rumours of a construction scandal and by his grandson’s decision to pursue a career in urban demolition, the antithesis of all Hugh himself has stood for. In this collapse of continuity between past and present, the novel signals towards a breakdown of family inheritance and an irreparable fracturing of political traditions.
More pointedly, O’Hagan gestures towards a crisis in paternalism as characteristic of general elements within Scottish culture. In the drunken melancholia of Robert, Jamie’s abusive father, the author locates a national dysfunctionalism: ‘Those Scottish fathers. Not for nothing their wives cried, not for nothing their kids. Cities of night above those five o’clock shadows. Men gone way too sick for the talking. And how they lived in the dark for us now. Or lived in our faces, long denied.’ Though the conclusion sees Jamie partially reconciled with a reformed and sober Robert, the novel’s searing critique of failed fatherhood remains a dark shadow on the present. Ultimately, Our Fathers presents this blighted inheritance as an allegory for the decline of modern Scotland, tracing a blood-line from post-war Utopianism to flawed contemporary revisionism, via an inescapable lineage of brutality and weakness.
While O’Hagan’s work perhaps takes risks in sustaining certain stereotypes of Scottish identity, his flair for engaging in rich and authentic social detail removes any predictability from his writing. And if the Scottish landscapes he draws are familiar from the work of fellow writers such as William McIlvanney and James Kelman, his specific focus on urban architectural history as a framework for his characters’ life stories is highly original.
In Personality (2003), O’Hagan takes as his theme the cult of celebrity, which he shows to be a modern malaise grounded in insincerity and manipulation. The protagonist, Maria Tambini, is loosely based on the Scottish child singing sensation Lena Zavaroni, and the story includes cameos by several real-life entertainers and television stars of the 1970s. But Maria’s story goes beyond facts, into a moving fictional portrait of the many Italians who settled in Scotland earlier in the century. The novel’s description of how members of the Tambini family were interned during the war; how their café windows were smashed and their businesses ostracised, provides the hidden immigrant history to the precarious position they eventually come to occupy, in a small fish and chip shop on the Scottish Isle of Bute. Maria’s journey from here to London, with its voracious celebrity culture, is a further stage therefore in the geographical displacements and political transitions of an extended and fragmented family history.
Beneath its engagement with what appears a rather superficial, even ‘tabloid’ subject, Personality is a complex interrogation of the historical, racial and ideological legacies which have produced modern Scotland. Through his characteristic archaeological approach, O’Hagan highlights the plurality - of lives, cultures and origins - which exists beneath the homogenous veneer of the nation. In doing so he rejects, definitively, facile versions of nationhood, and foregrounds instead a version of Scotland which remains difficult, volatile, and ambiguous.
Dr Eve Patten, 2003
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