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.
The Old Grey Owl 