Booker Prize-nominated author Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies, is a masterful exploration of friendship and commitment. Though set mainly in Glasgow, its poignancy in addressing existential questions made it universally relevant.
His new book, Caledonian Road, spanning over 600 pages and with a cast of 60 characters, examines a wider range of themes. Still, it’s surprisingly straightforward to distil: as a state-of-the-nation novel, it’s a snapshot of Britain from mid-2021, as it exited the period of Covid restrictions, to where it is today.
The book’s title is that of a 4km-long street in London, its blend of affluent and mixed-use residential areas, poorer council estates, trendy shops, notable architecture and a prison epitomising both England’s history and its fast-changing demographics. Caledonian Road was built 200 years ago as a link to Scotland. There’s authorial and plot relevance in this, O’Hagan having been born and raised in Glasgow, and some of the book’s characters yearning to escape London for a less seething milieu.
On one level, Caledonian Road is insularly British. This doesn’t mean it will not also appeal to readers uninterested in the foibles of the English character, the nuances of the country’s social fabric, or its political fault lines. The style and language are often beautiful, in keeping with art and the textures of creativity as one of its myriad themes. And the plot lines are intriguing, with multiple intricately connected strands and a slow-burn overarching narrative interspersed with fast-paced subplots.
O’Hagan captures England, particularly London, in a largely corrupt condition, masked by a veneer of respectability and the polish of wealth. This is epitomised in the changing, uneasy mind of the protagonist, 52-year-old Campbell Flynn, a celebrity art historian.
On the surface Flynn, “a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit”, lives a carefree, gilded life. But things are not what they seem. He’s just written a self-help book called Why Men Weep in Their Cars, but he did it because he needs money, and dissociates himself from authorship by recruiting a famous actor as the fronted author. This is a foreshadowing of his arrogant refusal to accept his disequilibrium. His wife starts cottoning on that his finances are in deep trouble, and that he may be psychologically disturbed.
Zooming out, the author starts to weave in characters immersed in other themes involving major global and UK-specific events and societal issues. We meet all-powerful House of Lords politicians happy to capitalise after having smoothed the passage of Brexit; a scheming Russian oligarch symbolising the penetration of Russian influence in the City of London, England’s and Europe’s financial hub; Flynn’s best friend, with whom his finances are intertwined but whose business empire is built on illegal and underpaid, dehumanised immigrant labour; an idealistic young climate activist, suggestive of the Just Stop Oil protesters; and a handful of awful criminals running people-smuggling networks.
Flynn’s distress is partly due to his knowledge and understanding of how tawdry London’s underbelly is, and how hypocritical his position is as a man-about-town who does nothing to facilitate change. But his increasing despair is also rooted in a preoccupation with feelings about his Glasgow childhood — a lack of familial love, a shortage of money and too much responsibility forced upon him too early in his life.
This translates into a growing sense of self-doubt, an impostor syndrome that leaks into all facets of his life. Believing he no longer has a purpose, his diminishing bank balance and the loss of his imprisoned best friend catalyse the feeling that everything is pointless — his marriage, his family, his home, his country.
Part of the human condition is the propensity to fail, to fall apart. Even if we don’t reach his extreme stage of disconnect, Flynn could be any of us.
O’Hagan captures England, particularly London, in a largely corrupt condition, masked by a veneer of respectability and the polish of wealth
Still, this is, of course, part hubris, part self-pity. Halfway through the book, some readers may tire of Flynn’s navel-gazing, his representation of the British middle-class tendency to sneer at the lower classes and fawn fascinatedly at the upper crust. O’Hagan is editor of the London Review of Books and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Like his protagonist, he was born in Glasgow, and there is a sense that he is probing for deeper understanding of his own place, a privileged one perhaps, in society. This tinge of autofiction adds a further layer of nuance: a novelist critiquing his character’s self-absorption, aware that it mirrors his own.
Readers should persevere; like Shakespeare’s great tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, the undertow is one of sorrow, something big that is breaking apart, with a rippling effect on other things.
Besides, the novel is also a journey into fascinating subcultures. Flynn’s son is a famous, globe-trotting DJ and his daughter an elite fashion model. Their worlds mesh in ways that are eye-popping — this is glitz and glamour on a scale that only the world’s most cosmopolitan city engenders. There are enthralling windows into the world of art, especially Renaissance masters like Johannes Vermeer of the Dutch Golden Age.
Dialogue, art and history interplay brilliantly in one passage. Flynn attends the opening of a pretentious exhibition of deliberately trashed works at the upmarket Gagosian gallery in London, where he ponders a streaked and gashed Time Saving Truth from Envy and Discord by the 17th-century religious painter Nicolas Poussin.
“Poussin was Anthony Blunt’s first love,” he comments to a fellow attendee, an investigative journalist whose recent exposés have hastened the arrest of his best friend and, with it, Flynn’s inevitable financial ruin. “You know who I’m talking about — Blunt? The art historian. The traitor. Perhaps you’re too young,” he sneers. The underlying connotation is whether Flynn has enough time to save himself from his own descent into discord.
“At a certain point, you need to look outside your family, the first unit of government, and see the society you have helped to make. In that sense, we have all done badly. Our values are polluted and our minds enslaved,” he writes to his friend William in prison. It’s a beautiful but brutal letter, expressing his love but also disowning him.
We know this will not end well, that Flynn is about to blow, and he does a shocking thing towards the end of the book. It can be interpreted as a watershed towards his renewal and redemption; or, Macbeth-like, a sign of futility — his hypocritical rage against the system is too pathetic to effect change, because “Life’s but a walking shadow ... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Caledonian Road is an extraordinarily ambitious book. “It took everything I had,” O’Hagan said in an interview around the book’s launch, adding that from concept to completion took 10 years.
The recent violent flashmobs that rolled across UK cities echo the yellow-vest protests in France, the antigovernment gatherings in Indonesia and Israel, the riots in Bangladesh and Kenya. In South Africa, does a week go by without a disruption or a manifestation of xenophobia? Anger, confusion and disaffection may be disproportionately amplified in the digital age, but they are very real, Caledonian Road shows, and they have very personal consequences.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.