Tag by Stephen May


Tag
Title : Tag
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1905614373
ISBN-10 : 9781905614370
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 272
Publication : First published January 1, 2008

Mistyann is fifteen, unpredictable, unreliable and violent. She’s also gifted. And now she’s on her way to Wales for a special residential course for talented youth. An American psychologist wants to unlock her potential, help her become the person that she’s always dreamt of being. God help Wales. God help us all.

Jonathan Diamond is forty-one. Looks a bit like Tom Cruise and he’s going to Wales too. A failed musician and a recovering alcoholic he’s now an Advanced Skills Teacher and he’ll be in loco parentis for the week. Together the two of them develop an unlikely and dangerous alliance as they are forced to confront difficult truths about themselves.

Part bleakly comic confession, part twisted romance, at heart an elegy for dreams that refuse to die, TAG is the fast-moving, at times shocking, story of two lives turned upside down by reckless moments and impulses that won’t be denied. Full of wit, drama and an eye for the absurdities of the way we live now, TAG is a memorable debut novel.

"Energy, wit, bile – May can really write."
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

"Tag is a cracking story which also has important things to say about youth; about middle age; about what it means to be considered gifted; about Wales and England, as well as some withering, satirical comment about contemporary life. It is also, in parts, very funny indeed. And in the character of Mistyann, Stephen May has created a thoroughly modern smalltown Miss. A motormouth underclass Holden Caulfield, if you will. A vividly alive fusion of wit, beauty and instinctive defiance of authority. A character who will linger in the mind long after you have finished the book."
Ray French

Stephen May is a hard-headed day-dreamer, always cynical but ever hopeful. He’s been a barman, warehouseman, museum attendant, low-level council flunkey, teacher, centre director of the Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank centre and TV writer. He became a Dad while still at college and spent several years in a series of low paid menial jobs, struggling to support his family. He used to drink a lot and spend a lot of time chasing women around, but found, like Flaubert, that it is best to "be a bourgeois in your life, so that you can be an anarchist in your art." You get more done and it’s more interesting in the long run. Steve lives in West Yorkshire with his wife and two youngest children. He is currently working on another novel (Life, Death, Prizes).


Tag Reviews


  • Adele Ward

    Are 15-Year-Old Girls Children?

    This is the question at the heart of Stephen May’s TAG, the novel that was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year before going on to win the Media Wales Readers’ Prize as the one most readers thought should have won. How should teacher Jonathan Diamond see his difficult pupil Mistyann, and how should he behave towards her? Politically correct answers become more difficult when he has to travel alone with her to an isolated manor house in North Wales for a special course aimed at helping Talented and Gifted children.

    From the start May lets us know things are going to go wrong: we’re just waiting to see how badly he could fall, or if it might all be a comedy of errors. We know Diamond has ended up in disgrace, so we’re with him at every moment hoping that he won’t do anything too drastic, and for a middle-aged man alone with a precocious teenager that’s nerve-wracking. At forty-one, and almost good-looking with some sort of resemblance to Tom Cruise, he’s obviously not of the right generation to be a friend to Mistyann. But he’s a recovering alcoholic who could be stressed into taking a drink and he was also gifted in his youth, a musician who underachieved, so his empathy is with her rather than with the other staff. He’s noncomformist enough to identify more with Mistyann than the system and the rules of behaviour that could protect them both.

    The characters are drawn so vividly that readers will remember them as real people they watched through this darkly comic drama. It’s not surprising to find that May is also a playwright, and he has obviously studied teenagers to create Mistyann and the others on the Talented and Gifted residential course. The chapters are written in first person narrative alternately by Diamond and Mistyann, and it’s quite an achievement how May can make us believe it’s a 15-year-old girl talking. She’s no Lolita, as teenagers in this millennium happily call out ‘perv’ or ‘paedo’ at the first sign of any suspect behaviour, and in this book they often do.

    While Diamond bungles step-by-step towards the court scene we hear about in the early chapters, we meet more characters drawn with the playwright’s penetrating vision of human behaviour. The American ed-psych guru Ariel La Rock is almost too easy a target, and the couple running manor are beautifully brought to life – the feeble and boyscoutish Ray who has brought back a feisty Asian wife called Susie from extensive travels where he was ‘finding himself’.

    It’s not easy to write well about teenagers, and the other students invited on the course are as believable as Mistyann. Clearly chosen for politically correct criteria rather than for purely academic reasons, they include the selection of races and the boy in the wheelchair that might mark them out as the ‘right sort of characters’ for an all-inclusive children’s book these days. As they get to know each other teenage sex is soon on the agenda and, again, May manages to write these scenes incredibly well. Being explicit while still avoiding the pitfalls is a challenge and it takes a brave writer to confront it.

    Bringing teenage sex in also raises more discussions, such as why we should consider Mistyann a child but still feel it’s right and normal for the kids to have relationships between themselves. The lovelessness of these relationships is also moving and made me step away from the book to think about our society – and I love it when a book makes me take time aside to meditate on the themes. Another question is about why it feels so troubling that Diamond is at risk of overstepping the boundaries with Mistyann, while somehow it’s just comical if a young female teacher gets involved with a teenage boy.

    There’s so much more in TAG: the family Mistyann comes from with the serial relationships of her mother and the way responsibility for looking after the children and cooking has fallen to her. There’s a whole vision of the way we’re expecting teenagers to live today, not to mention the confusion of the adults. May never comments on any of this: he just brings it to life and different readers will draw different conclusions to me, but it will make all readers think.

    Is a 15-year-old girl a child? Yes, she is, even though the explicit sex and the risk of pregnancy show she’s old enough to be a mother, and she’s also a better mother than her own one as we can see when she looks after her siblings. Are most men attracted to 15-year-old girls as a group of highly intelligent men in a book discussion group told me recently? Possibly. If so May is brave in revealing this when he does cross that line at times to show us what Diamond finds himself thinking, almost despite his conscious decisions. May pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable in this novel, in a way that few novelists do when talking about underaged characters. But sometimes you have to push that boundary to raise the discussion of how we should look after these children. The portrayal of how good a teenage mother could be was also welcome.

  • Ian Kirkpatrick

    Stephen May. Remember the name. You will certainly hear it again.

    There is quite a thrill in finding a new writer that you admire (tinged with just a hint of mild envy). TAG is May’s debut novel, and quite simply it is stunning.

    I’ll freely admit, with a hint of shame, that I had some trepidation about reading a novel where the main protagonist was called Mistyann. Now I can happily sneer at my misguided prejudice. Mistyann is a wonderful piece of characterisation.

    TAG [acronym for Talented and Gifted] tells the story of fifteen year old Mistyann, a troubled, unpredictable, foul-mouthed yet gifted child who is selected to attend a residential course for teen prodigies in mid-Wales. She is accompanied for the week by her acerbic forty-something teacher Jon Diamond, a frustrated musician and dried-out alcoholic. In the confined setting of the residential course their lives both unravel through a series of unfortunate events which are in turn both comedic and emotionally-charged.

    May eschews a linear narrative, and structures his book with deft precision through a series of careful time shifts. He alternates the first person narration between the two main characters, creating utterly believable voices for each of them. He also makes clever use of second person narration with JD effectively addressing Mistyann as if writing her a confessional letter. I’m certain that much of the author’s own voice is used for the character of JD, but his real skill is in creating such a rich and authentic voice for the moody and belligerent Mistyann. However May’s palette is wider still and even his minor characters crackle with life and realism. By getting under their skins he has an uncanny knack of making you care about his characters and their back stories. He creates a strong ensemble cast and uses them to good effect.

    Mistyann’s dysfunctional extended family is a good case in point, where May sketches out a believable mother, with her various partners and children without resorting to particularly obvious stereotypes.

    May’s experiences on Arvon courses have obviously underpinned many of his descriptions of the TAG Residential Course, although I suspect his teaching style may be slightly more orthodox than the American educational psychologist of his novel. I’m quite surprised that he managed to get the Cinnamon Press, (a Welsh independent publishing house) to publish a book which both mocks and ridicules the Welsh at times, so full marks to them for a self-referential sense of humour.

    In TAG May bravely tackles a number of difficult subjects, confronting taboos and challenging prejudices. He leaves me convinced that he is a writer to watch out for, and I look forward to his second novel with keen anticipation.

  • Carol

    A powerfully written book that plots the destructive course taken by both
    Mistyann,a 15 year-old Talented and Gifted(TAG) girl, and her 41 year-old teacher, Jonathon, when they attend a residential course with eight other teen prodigies in a remote house in Wales. The author's portrayal of both characters is pitch-perfect. He has an amazing ability to get into the mind of a sneering and defiant teenage girl as well as tapping the angst of a middle-aged man who has, in the past, struggled with alcohol and failure. However, because I found it hard to like or sympathise with the characters it was not a book that really touched me. His subsequent book,
    "Life, Death, Prizes" is much more moving.



  • Adnan Mahmutovic<span class=

    Cinnamon Press treats their readers to this wonderful weave of two sides of a disturbing chain of events between a young Talented and Gifted (TAG) student Mistyann and her older teacher.

    The prose is raw and a little sentimental despite its irony, which keeps me riveted. We move from the male to the young female mind, which are of course quite different. This texture only strengthens their particular and peculiar relationship.