Hey Man, Andrew Meehan, (Muswell Press, £12.99)
Across four previous novels Andrew Meehan has explored love in its various forms, and in Hey Man he embarks on a moving journey through a friendship between two men that endures for three decades.
Meehan, senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Strathclyde University, opens it in 1989, when 17-year-old Dubliner Ian Cleary is awaiting his exam results ahead of starting medical school in the autumn. Arrangements have been made for him to spend the summer in London at his father’s cousin Tommy Carmody’s house in Crouch End. It’s a ramshackle, ivy-covered house with books in the bath and a surfboard in the kitchen, the kind of place, as Ian puts it, that has three hat-racks but no toaster.
Tommy is away a lot of the time shooting films, and when Ian finally meets the 30-year-old actor he’s wearing a sarong, his hair “hanging long and loose like a fern”. “Both brutish and babyish”, he’s a free spirit who drinks, eats, laughs and argues like his life depends on it, frequently starting the day with a drink and strenuously avoiding eating or going to bed at the same times as regular folk. But there are wells of sadness and vulnerability in him too, only really glimpsed by Ian when Tommy talks about his ex-wife, but running deep.
Ian is besotted with him, and remains so throughout his life. Many of us treasure memories of a halcyon summer of being away from home for the first time when the adult world opens up and everything is new and full of possibilities. This is Ian’s summer. During the day, he works on a building site, earning what seems like a fortune to a teenager, but the rest of his life revolves around Tommy. It’s a complex relationship, and ultimately one that only the two of them understand. “I could only recognise my love for him in juxtaposition with suffering and loss,” Ian remembers. “Real friendship seemed to involve hanging around and feeling sad, of the joy that formed the initial equation being removed from it, and watching it disappear in slow motion.”
Their story is picked up again in 2004, after Ian has turned his back on medicine to become a Benedictine monk in the Highlands. Tommy has never been far from his mind, and their paths eventually cross at a wedding, where Ian has been invited to officiate. Tommy has always found it hard to reconcile himself with Ian’s decision to enter a monastery, maintaining that “our best men” should be out in the world, contributing. But, even as he’s coming to terms with Ian’s life choices, overcoming his anger and even being able to show signs of pride, the extent of Tommy’s desolation is becoming apparent to his friend, along with his physical decline.
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Also attending is Rosemary Walton, Ian’s teenage sweetheart, whose presence tests the monk’s vows and who, like his new father-figure Ambrose from the monastery, is another character who gives Ian cause to reflect on his understanding of love and faith.
One final encounter comes in 2019 with Tommy’s health failing: another poignant meeting in which each makes strained attempts to articulate his feelings to the other, though their love has always been impossible to deny.
“When there is so much to say, you end up saying nothing very well.” It’s a sad refrain that could apply to most of Ian and Tommy’s conversations post-1989. But, in this quietly contemplative novel, that expresses so much while leaving most of it unsaid, it’s not a charge that could be brought against Meehan.
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