Hey Man by Andrew Meehan review: 'truly moving'

Andrew Meehan | Concept Graft

When you’re 17 and new to London and away from your folks in Dublin, someone like your father’s cousin Tommy Carmody is always going to make an impression. Chances are you won’t know any actors like him, much less ones with friends you recognise from Mike Leigh films. At 17, you still might not have regularly drunk champagne in summer gardens until dawn or heard anyone play the guitar in the bath like he does or shop as unpredictably, heading off to buy bread and coming back with a couple of pounds of langoustines and demanding a barbecue no matter what time it is.

That, at least, is what it feels like to Ian, the introspective narrator of this quietly powerful novel about male friendship, which starts off with him lodging in Tommy’s Crouch End house. This is a place as unpredictable and extrovert as he is: three hat racks but no toaster, a surfboard in the kitchen, books in the bathroom, clothes left lying all over the living room. It’s the summer of 1989, and Ian spends it working on building sites before starting to train as a doctor and, away from work, meeting girls, drinking cava from paper cups, playing frisbee and falling deeply in love with Tommy.

Andrew Meehan, who teaches creative writing at Strathclyde University, has written extensively about love in four previous novels - the last of which, Best Friends, has been described as “Normal People for pensioners”. The difference here is that the love between Ian and Tommy is platonic and lasts decades. Oh yes, and that for at least two of those, Ian is a Benedictine monk.

At the start, though, one can see how the Sally Rooney comparison would make sense for this novel too. Ian’s friendship with Tommy may lack the sexual chemistry pulling Marianne and Connell together in Rooney’s bestseller, but the two men share the same inability to express their feelings, and also only understand each other retrospectively, when the moment has passed.

At first, this is only to be expected. Ian is too young, too self-aware, too nervous, too in awe of his roistering, charismatic landlord. So far, so predictable. What isn’t is his slow realisation of the despair at lost love, the deep vulnerability, that Tommy’s partying persona masks.

Meehan’s novel is a triptych, dividing roughly into Ian’s discovery of the world, of God, and of love. The first section has all the freshness of a 17-year-old taking in London in great gulps while desperately trying to remain unimpressed; in 2004, he is immersed in the ego-banishing routines of a Scottish monastery, only interrupted by a request to be the “fun priest” at a friend’s wedding; and in 2019, with illness approaching, he tries to sum up what his own and Tommy’s lives have taught him.

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Each of these dates is a fairly brutal jump cut, which frees Meehan from many of the exigencies of plot. When, for example, Ian the medic suddenly becomes Brother Eugene the monk, the reader isn’t told why his “heart was in an iron clamp”, or whether there were any other emotional commitments in his past other than the rather sweet girl he took to the Prom and who wanted more of him than she got. Instead, he can concentrate on Ian’s inner/spiritual life and the one question that, at all stages of his life, he wants Tommy to answer: “Why weren’t we both smart enough to accommodate an existence that doesn’t make perfect sense?”

This isn’t a perfect novel: sometimes Meehan’s descriptions lack focus and his dialogue is occasionally too stagey. But I’ll forgive all of that for the final scene, when Ian looks back at the grace that friendship has brought him. By that stage, you might have thought, he has said everything that needed to be said about Tommy. But no: there’s more, and Meehan rounds off his novel with a truly moving finale.

Hey Man, by Andrew Meehan, Muswell Press, £12.99

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