Caledonian Road — Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-Britain novel
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Caledonian Road, the Scottish novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan’s seventh novel — a Dickensian doorstopper laced with the kind of satire we might more readily associate with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair — opens in London in May 2021. Over the course of the 656 pages that follow, we’re treated to a year in the life of the city as measured out in the lives of a motley crew of its inhabitants.
At the centre of it all is Campbell Flynn, a 52-year-old art historian: feted celebrity intellectual, “a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit”, a “liberal in a bohemian sense”. Campbell is perennially poised to trot out his opinions on everything from selfie culture to haute couture.
From their working-class Glaswegian childhoods, both Campbell and his sister Moira — a senior barrister and Labour MP — have climbed the greasy poles to power. But while Moira has kept one foot firmly on the ground, Campbell’s bought into his own mythology. As one of his students cannily observes, he likes to think that he’s “one of the good guys”, a different, loftier breed than the corruption-tainted, privileged folk with whom he rubs shoulders.
That there will be a downfall is never in question, as is the fact that Campbell will be the agent of his own destruction. The tension is all in the how, and O’Hagan tosses in a handful of red herrings to keep us entertained along the way. His best friend, the reputationally risky retail tycoon Sir William Byre, is the most immediate threat; there’s also the trashy treatise on modern masculinity that Campbell secretly pens to earn much-needed dosh, a scheme that risks coming unstuck. But most insidious of all is his blossoming friendship with Milo, a student. Campbell knows his protégé is clever, but he doesn’t grasp the size of the threat.
“All destinies must in good time collide,” we’re warned, and each of the 59 names helpfully listed in the cast of characters at the beginning of the book has their role to play — whether peer of the realm, hairdresser or human trafficker. Caledonian Road, named for the London thoroughfare that runs from gentrifying King’s Cross through prosperous Islington to the grimy Holloway Road, is a series of interlocking cogs, the action of one unlocking that of another. There’s a certain playfulness to O’Hagan’s braiding together of these narrative threads as they twist and turn through the streets of the capital; the title also reflects, we sense, the Scottish hero’s journey.
Visiting his mentor’s elegant home just off the road, Milo reflects on “the expensive sense of entitlement that dwells in these wide London squares.” Milo comes from Caledonian Road itself; minutes away in real time, but a world apart in socio-economic terms. If this is a state-of-the-nation novel, O’Hagan paints a bleak portrait. “Britain,” one character observes, is a place “where the routines of civility and the habits of art are threaded with a history of brutality.”
The ongoing pandemic looms large; so do the rppling aftershocks of #MeToo (no self-respecting contemporary condition of England novel would be without a storyline involving accusations of sexual misconduct). And this is a city awash with Russian money, in which oligarchs court British peers and fish for political favours. “Mr Johnson gave us freedom. Mr Brown gave us passports. Mr Blair gave us a reason to be here. London has been our friend,” states one. Meanwhile state schoolteachers in the capital are dying from Covid.
O’Hagan can be very witty, most deliciously when it comes to strained relations between the generations. The interior design choices made by a playboy son are caustically described as “Freudian revenge décor”. A “right-wing banshee” of a columnist caustically mocks her son’s eco-activism: “It must be so exhausting, darling. Like Germinal, but with oat milk and hemp slippers.”
But for all these moments, I found Caledonian Road a rather brittle, bombastic book. O’Hagan’s creations feel less like characters and more like caricatures, and the bon mots eventually became tiring. “High-minded values are merely low-minded prejudices dressed in the robes of office,” we hear, a little ploddingly. Or: “she’d struck so many poses as a journalist that she couldn’t recognise the difference between opinion and morality.”
O’Hagan has a tendency to both show and tell. When one of Milo’s oldest friends lands up in court for carrying a knife, Milo reflects, “The authorities don’t see his culture, they call his talent criminal and they stop and search him, calling him antisocial.” Not only is this stating the obvious, it sounds too much like the something a member of the ‘woke’ left would say in an attempt to prove themselves an ally. And while the novel told me a lot, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Perhaps such details add to the portrait of a particular moment in history; what we might tentatively predict as the last gasp of a lengthy Tory government, and the changes their rule have wrought on London in particular.
As his reporting on the Grenfell Tower fire for the London Review of Books showed, O’Hagan doesn’t shy away from challenging subjects. In fact, the 60,055-word essay he wrote on the subject in 2018 has something of the same panoramic sweep of Caledonian Road. Years hence, I think they’ll make for fascinating, albeit flawed, companion pieces.
As for reading the novel here and now, though, I admired the endeavour, but I can’t honestly say I enjoyed the experience. Yet perhaps it would be unfair to lay the blame for this entirely at O’Hagan’s door. He didn’t invent these obscenities of great wealth and privilege, nor the trickle-down violence and inequality that they cause. He’s simply depicting it all, with galling verisimilitude.
Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan, Faber £20/WW Norton $32.50, 656 pages
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