Caledonian Road (2024)

Why this one?

This was an ARC from Faber & Faber via Netgalley (many thanks!) - This one in particular jumped out at me because of the title and its obvious subject matter: London. I’ve lived in the capital for most of the past few decades and can’t resist a good literary stab at telling its stories. Beyond that, there were glowing recommendations from the likes of Monica Ali (no stranger to literary depictions of London) that cemented the sense that this was one not to miss.

Andrew O'Hagan (1968- ; active 1995- ) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. He grew up in a working class family, with four elder brothers and a father who was a violent alcoholic. He was the first in his family to attend university, gaining his BA in English from the University of Strathclyde in 1990. Following graduation, he worked on the staff of the London Review of Books for four years.

His debut release was a non-fiction work, The Missing (1995), which told stories of the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. His first novel Our Fathers (1999) catapulted him to wider attention when it was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Booker, a relatively rare feat then for a debut novel. It lost out to second-time winner J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. In 2003 his next novel Personality won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

He has since published a further four novels, including The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), told in the voice of a Scottish Maltese poodle, and 2020's acclaimed Mayflies, which was adapted by the BBC in 2022. He has received two subsequent Booker longlist appearances, for Be Near Me (2006) and The Illuminations (2015). Despite all of this, he is perhaps most widely known for his role as a ghostwriter for Julian Assange, subsequently becoming an occasionally reluctant commentator on the latter's life and actions.

Thoughts, etc.

Caledonian Road is set largely on and around the titular thoroughfare, which heads northwards from near London’s King’s Cross station. Its action takes place in the very recent past, in a year’s period between early 2021 (and the ending of major Covid restrictions) and early 2022 (with Russian’s invasion of Ukraine on the imminent horizon). It’s introduced (at least in this pre-release version) by an extensive list of characters, setting the tone for the sprawling, somewhat Dickensian nature of the 600-ish pages to follow. At its undoubted centre, though, is the aging white liberal academic Campbell Flynn, clearly something of a proxy for the author. Having worked his way up in society from humble Glaswegian roots, through a combination of academic achievement and marriage into minor aristocracy, Campbell is a lecturer at UCL, a published art historian (most recently of an acclaimed life of Vermeer), sometime glossy magazine columnist and podcaster. Yet he senses shifting sands in society, and mostly the ones that uphold everything that he holds dear. Campbell, like the liberal intelligentsia he represents, is in crisis. And so, it seems, are his city and his country.

It’s a novel that’s unafraid to stake its claim to be a ‘state of the nation’ epic, and its pages check off just about every concern that’s been dominating the national news agenda for the past few years. Russian interference in global affairs, and the void in financing soon to be left by their sanctioning on the back of Ukraine, looms large over the whole novel, in the shape of the father/son Bykov duo. Immigration is of course present and correct, providing one of the novel’s most shocking moments as well as a more subtle thread highlighting the trials and hardships which Brexit and a fanatically anti-migrant government agenda have driven those who want to make a life in Britain to endure. Being set in London, gang violence is obviously in there to a significant extent too. Institutional corruption underpins all of the above, with Campbell connected by marriage and friendship to various corners of a rotten elite that is both crumbling and seemingly indestructible. The impact of Covid is also interestingly addressed, largely something that’s being brushed away in the timeframe of the novel, but its impact still very much felt by at least two key characters. The rise and fall of Bitcoin is an important plot point. Alongside all of that, we get token nods to questions of gender identity (there’s one non-binary character), celebrity / influencer culture and the Climate Crisis. The latter in particular is given especially cursory attention - perhaps one issue too many to cram in.

If that sounds a lot for one book, however hefty, it certainly is. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of characters to keep track of, many of whom seem to be introduced to exemplify a trend or a side of an argument rather than existing as fully rounded people that you actually care about. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to admire here. There’s a thriller-like quality to its pacing, mounting tension and general ‘hookiness’. Its threads are also pretty cleverly woven together, in a way that both contributes to its compelling nature as a read and adds to its force as a commentary on the interconnectedness of the many issues we’re facing as a society. It’s also, for a book that crams in so much in terms of ‘issues’, remarkably light in tone (at least until its increasingly dark revelations start to kick in later on) and a breezier read than one might expect.

At times I got a sense that the elaborate character list and endless compounding of issues was a bit of a red herring. Is O’Hagan really inviting us to give equal attention to all of these characters and issue? By the end it felt more like they all existed as representatives of the weight crashing down on its undoubted ‘hero’, Campbell Flynn. The novel is less interested (or at least less successful in dealing with) the state of the nation than it is with the state of one man’s mental health. Of course, Flynn represents more than just himself, he’s clearly emblematic (first) of a certain class of London liberal intellectuals, and more generally of white men of a certain age. Perhaps more broadly, he’s at the eye of the storm when it comes to factions of society that feel that their lifestyle (and perhaps livelihoods and even lives) are under existential threat from the myriad changes massing around them in society. The title also seems deliberately localised. I’m less inclined to believe that O’Hagan sees Caledonian Road as a genuine ‘melting pot’ of all aspects of society, and more that he’s using it for the specifics of what it can represent: an intersection of extremes of society - with Flynn’s ‘Islington elites’ on one side and the shiny, corporate fantasy-lands of Coal Drops Yard and its gigantic tech-bro campuses on the other, both rubbing up against modern-day slum-level housing for migrants, and neglected estates housing second and third generation immigrants. That these are extremes of society rather than ‘representative’ of what everyday Brits experience is something that feels quite crucial to the novel’s interests.

Campbell’s downfall is undoubtedly the most successful part of the book, and therefore (since I rather enjoyed the majority of it) I prefer to look at the other characters more in terms of their impact on him than in their own rights. The ‘gang violence’ side of the story, in particular, made me feel a little uncomfortable in places, reading like slightly cliched observations rather than stories built on or informed by lived experience. But if we’re ultimately viewing these threads in light of their appearance to Campbell’s increasingly fractured mind, then that makes a degree more sense. (Perhaps I’m being overly generous in my reading, but hey, it works for me!) One of the most entertaining threads of the book is Campbell’s foray into self-help fiction, under the ostensibly almost comic title Why Men Weep in Cars, a publication he refuses to put out under his own name and instead sends out into the world in the care of a popular and attractive young actor, with spectacularly disastrous consequences. Its title, initially seeming like a semi-ironic money grab from the seemingly confident and successful academic, comes more and more to seem like a genuine cry for help from someone genuinely wrestling with a crisis in masculinity / status.

It’s a book with a lot to say - it’s full of quotable moments and darkly humorous observations - but it’s not perhaps as outward-facing in scope as it first appears. It doesn’t offer or really look for answers to the grand societal issues it documents, but it does offer a remarkable window on a particularly brief period of time for one man, who sees all around him crumbling and leads himself into despair as a result. Campbell as a character spends much of the novel staring inwardly and into voids: attempting to conjure the fantasy life of a long-dead painter with virtually zero evidence to work from; hiding his own (true?) thoughts behind an actor and a constructed layer of irony; and latterly journeying into the darker realms of the internet. His closest family seem not to know him, and he feels that he hasn’t known the truth of many of his closest associates. If the novel is advocating for anything, it’s perhaps for greater communication, openness and conversation - both between seemingly disparate elements of society and with ourselves.

Score

9

I’m guessing we’ll be hearing a fair bit about this one in 2024. If nothing else, it’s a highly topical and broad-ranging read from an established and respected author. It’s also, though, a book that I think will provoke a lot of lively conversation and debate, dealing as it does with so many weighty issues with such a light and readable touch. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but given its extremely grand ambitions it delivers remarkably well on lots of levels.

Next up

I’m finally going to finish my read-through of Women’s Prize winners, with Ruth Ozeki’s 2022 winner The Book of Form and Emptiness.