Tag: Fiction of the year

Caledonian Road

O’Hagan triumphs with that rare beast – a State of the Nation novel with heart.

The latest novel from Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road, is a big beast, in every sense of the term. Physically, it’s got some heft. 640 pages of hard back book makes demands on the wrists. It’s also dealing with weighty, contemporary issues, so all told, the experience of reading it provides a holistic mind and body workout. Sounds like a week at a Spartan health farm, where the motto is no pain, no gain, but fear not dear readers, this novel also provides pure pleasure.

O’Hagan handles the intermingling of the personal and political with real skill and delicacy. A lesser novelist would have eschewed ideology and party politics for fear of committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of the serious, sensitive, superior and above-the-fray Literature Critics, that is the sin of taking sides. Ideology is both vulgar and limiting in this fragrant, lofty world. Evenhandedness is much more mature, much more subtle, much more human, darling. Perhaps. It’s certainly much more boring, in my opinion.

O’Hagan says a hearty bollocks to that and has dived in headfirst to this dissection of contemporary London society, and the power structures that both drive it and destroy it. He does it primarily through great storytelling. The novel succeeds first and foremost on that fundamental, primary level. The characters, their relationships, triumphs and disasters are memorable and compelling, even the utterly ghastly ones. Maybe especially the ghastly ones.

For the protagonist, Campbell Flynn, O’Hagan treads well-travelled paths. Working class lad done good, from the grim dereliction of 1970s  Glasgow, Flynn at the time of the novel’s start is an academic, a cultural commentator, and a media darling down in that there London. Not a million miles away, obviously, from O’hagan’s own background, material previously plundered in his exquisite Mayflies. And not just London, but very specifically Kings Cross, an area recently reinvented by money and gentrification, but one which has pungent resonance for any refugee from the North. As a first entry point for East Coast  Scots and Northerners, its streets, legends, and institutions retain a powerful grip on those arriving wide eyed from the sticks. Judd Street, the Eight till Late, the Scala, Peabody housing, Squats and Short Life flats, ULU, one hour rooms in lines of seedy hotels, kicking used syringes and condoms to one side leaving one’s flat in the morning – they are all part of the memory kaleidoscope conjured by the name Kings Cross.

As a big beast, the novel is teeming with characters, so much so that O’Hagan thoughtfully provides a cast list of two fully crammed pages. It’s essential if you want smooth passage through this behemoth, and a trick that Dickens himself could have profitably employed. The plot is multi-stranded and brilliantly handled, so that by the time the book has reached the halfway point, every time a new section of the book begins, there’s a sense of excitement at the resumption of that particular plot thread. That happens for all of the separate threads. That’s a real achievement. Usually, there’s always at least one thread that the reader has less engagement with, where you feel you’re treading water and sticking with, out of a sense of obligation. Here, all of them sing.

It’s a novel with laudable ambition, tackling big, serious issues. Any analysis of the current, woeful state of the UK would examine these topics in some depth, and O’Hagan looks them straight in the eye and explores them with both a pitiless forensic gaze and nuance, which allows him to eschew simplistic judgements and portray the issues and the characters with multilayered complexity. These are not the scribblings of a naive schoolboy marxist. He manages to cover

  • People trafficking
  • Cancel culture
  • British exceptionalism
  • The aristocracy
  • Public Schools
  • Russian money laundering
  • Social Media
  • Celebrity Culture
  • Gentrification
  • Housing 

All of this produces an excoriating picture of the malign influence of the British establishment, their sense of entitlement and superiority, and the devastating impact they have had on destroying Civil Society for everyone except the super rich. The “freedom” this class espouses becomes simply freedom for millionaires to become billionaires without the state interfering.

There will be readers at this point who are thinking, “Bloody hell, this sounds far too political for me. I don’t understand this stuff and/or I just want a story about people and relationships” Keep the faith, you apoliticals! O’Hagan delivers on that front as well, with a huge range of individuals and families, all of whom, even the nasty Tories, are portrayed sympathetically. It’s Dickensian in that sense, and similar in many ways to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. An energetic, densely populated romp set in multicultural, class-riven contemporary London, it is, like Dickens, a serious work masquerading as an entertainment. Or the other way round.

There was one dud note for me at the beginning. His portraits of Media stars, the establishment, and the political classes all rang true and had the hallmark of authenticity. I found, at first, his depiction of knife wielding, estate dwelling, drug dealers less successful. It felt as if he had spent some time eavesdropping on an unfamiliar underclass and had produced a two dimensional portrayal. By the end, however, I was convinced and O’Hagan had totally won me over. This is A Great Novel, and I can’t wait for the adaptation, film or TV. Already commissioned, apparently.

My Novel of the Year – by a mile.

My Books of the Year

or in the words of Steven Patrick Morrisey, “There’s more to life than books you know. But not much more, not much more.”

It’s great being retired or semi-retired as an English teacher. There’s so much more time to read books. Here’s just a few I got through in 2019.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

What a treat this book proved at the end of a challenging year. An affectionate homage to the golden age of American superhero comics from the thirties onward, this book tells the story of two Jewish creative entrepreneurs, who take New York by storm, making and losing a fortune on the way. Sammy Clay is troubled by his closet homosexuality, while Joe Kavalier, his cousin,  a recent emigre from Nazi- occupied Czechoslovakia, is tormented by the failure of his plans to engineer a similar, life-saving escape for this younger brother Tommy. This is an emotional, engaging and exciting read. Beautiful.


Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

When Nicholls gets it right, he really gets it right. His style, so lucid, so transparent, so non-tricksy, effortlessly carries the reader through the book as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. You almost don’t notice you’re reading, the book just happens in front of you. In that sense, it was like drinking a long cold glass of water when you’re thirsty on a hot summer’s day. A lovely, affecting story of a boy’s first serious  seventeen year old love, one long hot summer while taking part in an outdoor production of “Romeo and Juliet”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I read this not having read “The Handmaid’s Tale” (I know, shocking), but having watched and enjoyed the TV adaptation. Or at least enjoyed the first series. So when it suddenly appeared on the New Books shelf of my local library, it seemed like providence was forcing my hand. And I’m very glad it did because it was a fabulous book. It seemed to be part of what is a very modern phenomenon, a creative interaction between film, television and literature. (See also Game of Thrones) The book expects familiarity with the TV version and builds on that. The result was a satisfying conclusion to the dilemmas posed by the Dystopian world created by the original book and sustained by the subsequent television series. A worthy Booker winner.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

Another gift in a Booker promotion by my library. I was seduced by the pristine crisp pages of a new, untouched hardback, with its perfect polythene wrapper glistening under the strip lighting. When I had seen the book listed, I was at first rather cynical about it. I must confess I hadn’t read any Rushdie since Midnight’s Children, and I thought that this must be the Old Guard, stale and irrelevant, pulling a few strings to steal a few more moments in the Literary spotlight. This was compounded by reading an article somewhere that suggested something similar on the back of his ex-agent being involved with the short-listing. Or something like that. And then I read it. What a treat! Very funny, full of allusions to contemporary culture, bonkers story -within- a -story structure. One review I read suggested that Rushdie was just showing off with his verbal pyrotechnics used for no greater purpose, but that is a jaded and cynical view, I think. Genuinely enjoyable.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Seven eighths of this book is glorious, a frustrated Remainer’s tonic. It uses the much-loved character of Benjamin Trotter and friends, who first appeared in The Rotters Club back in 2001 (was it really 18 years ago?), to explore what Brexit meant to fifty- something vaguely liberal lefty middle class handwringers. Some hilarious set piece scenes and some skilful skewering of the political classes and the rise of unquestioned racism in our society, make the book both entertaining and analytical. Coe’s prose style, similar to David Nicholls in many ways, never intrudes on the unfolding of the story. My only caveat was the ending which I found unconvincing. Nonetheless, I can’t wait for Trotter’s next outing, hopefully to expose the dog’s breakfast Johnson will inevitably make of Brexit and to be part of the come-uppance such a calculated programme of lies deserves.

Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor

This is a glorious imagining of the relationship between Bram Stoker, he of Dracula fame, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry at the end of the nineteenth century /beginning of the twentieth. Irving, the celebrity actor producer of the late Victorian stage takes Stoker and his wife under his wing and relocates him from Dublin to London where Irving has become the Actor/Manager of The Lyceum. An intense set of relationships is explored, enmeshed in delightful period detail, with appearances by Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper in the suitably foggy streets of London. “Star of the Sea” by O’Connor is one of my all-time favourite books and this is a worthy return to that kind of form

Sacred Country by Rose Tremain.

What a great writer Tremain is. This was another chance selection on a routine trip to the library, but what a find it proved to be. This was first published in 1992 and is astonishingly ahead of its time. It was reissued in 2017 to exploit the recent interest in transgender issues and it’s a book that must be read. It is, in part, the first person narrative of a girl who feels she has always actually been a boy. It starts in the fifties in rural Suffolk and relates her struggle to make the transition in a much less sympathetic time. Beautiful and affecting. Read it.

More to come next week, Christmas excesses permitting……