Many years ago, I heard a well-known English novelist refer to Andrew O’Hagan, somewhat disparagingly, as “Andrew O’Tolstoy.” He was making a point about O’Hagan’s seriousness. At the time, O’Hagan was much better known as a critic and nonfiction writer for the London Review of Books. But it popped into my head again when I saw the very first thing in his new novel, Caledonian Road: a cast of characters.
I always find these helpful, especially in Russian novels, where everyone has three names and there are a lot of characters. There are 58 in Caledonian Road, and some of them indeed have more than one name. Examples: “Candy, Duchess of Kendal—Elizabeth’s sister. Nickname: Nighty,” and “Anthony, Duke of Kendal—Candy’s husband. Nickname: Snaffles.” The British class system being what it is, I hated them instantly.
Cutesy nicknames are a feature of the British aristocracy; other classes get more dramatic monikers. Other people with nicknames: “Devan Swaby—aka Big Pharma, 22, friend of Milo and Travis,” “Lloyds—real name Jeremiah Beckford, friend of Milo and Travis,” and “0044—gang member, real name Damon Taylor.” Travis is “Travis Babb—Milo’s best friend, drill rapper, aka Ghost 24.”
We have, as in Tolstoy, a broad sweep of society—as well as an ambitious attempt at a state-of-the-nation novel, at a time when the nation is in a pretty bad state. O’Hagan favors the deep dive in his nonfiction, whether into bitcoin or the disastrous Grenfell fire. With a new government in place for the first time in 14 years, this novel offers a kind of exhaustive temperature check on the sick man of Europe.
The epigraph, taken from fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, goes, “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.” From the beginning, then, we are given plenty of hints that this isn’t going to be a cozy little comedy, although at 650 pages or so, it isn’t going to be a little anything. “Something in his [Campbell’s] life was off,” we read early on, “and he felt that he was steering gradually towards a precipice.”
Campbell Flynn is the main character, an “art historian and celebrity academic” who has achieved a kind of low-level fame as the author of a book on the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Campbell (he’s usually called that, not Flynn) is related by marriage to Nighty and Snaffles, but comes, like O’Hagan, from the Catholic Scottish working class—and also shares with his creator an alcoholic father and a shift to the milieu of London intellectuals. Milo, the friend of 0044, Big Pharma, and Lloyds, is his student, and the antagonist of the novel; he decides, out of a sense of class warfare and spurred by the death of his mother from COVID, to destroy Campbell’s life.
The Catholicism (there are also Polish Catholics here) reminds me of Evelyn Waugh, the class- and faith-obsessed British author I think it’s meant to, for Waugh is referred to by name and work a couple of times, and the book echoes the frenzied hedonism of Vile Bodies and the stately homes of Brideshead.
To do this kind of thing involves evoking and describing a fantastical level of wealth, and therefore privilege and influence and decadence. O’Hagan is light on the decadence, just enough, but pretty heavy on the wealth, as well as the names or labels on which wealth can spread itself. The book is awash in Cristal Champagne, lightly dusted in cocaine—except when we are in the parts of the novel set in the seedier sections of London, when it becomes instead a world of petty gangsters, heroin, and violence.
There’s a long tradition of trying to unite high and low in London in the same narrative; recently, we had John Lanchester’s Capital, a sweeping portrait of post-crash Britain, and before that we had Martin Amis’s 1989 black comedy London Fields, and long before that we had a lot of Charles Dickens. London has always been a place where the rich and the poor live side by side. Making these people mix is the novelist’s job. Here’s some of the low life:
The boys were making their ruckus when a small white kid called 0044 opened a JD Sports with knives in it. Big knives; machetes. He was showing them off, but was so wrecked he was practically drooling, flailing around. “That yute is a proper nitty,” Travis said to Big Pharma and Lloyds. “I’m serious. Look at him. He’s always popping on suttin? What’s he doing here, bruv?”
And here is some of the high life:
But she knew her stuff. A handmade light feature from Atelier Schroeter, a kind of Alexander Calder, which set the tone for the whole apartment, was hanging above the bronze internal stairs. From there it was Dubai-chic-by-numbers: the Paul Smith rugs and the African masks and the cow-hide chairs from Timothy Oulton, standing to bleak social attention around an oak dining table. McQueenishly, there were brass moths on the pendant lights, and piles of oversized books on marble tables—Louis Vuitton, Brassaï, Agnes Martin. Tara wondered what it would be like to step into a lifestyle where nothing was yours. She peered past the potted plants to see a stainless steel kitchen. “Good Lord,” she said. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.
The book is riddled with these knowing nods to designers and artists; it is as if we are being invited to both gasp and sneer at the same time.
Campbell’s background is implicitly, and at times explicitly, contrasted with the world he has arrived in. There is another working-class Scot in the novel: She comes up in the world, too, briefly, becoming the mistress of one of the wealthy characters; but she’s also a prostitute and a heroin addict who comes to a sticky end.
A few people, if not all those who deserve it, come to sticky ends in this novel. The first few hundred pages were spent, by me at least, wondering which one of the characters would get it in the neck first. Almost all the characters in it richly deserve some kind of terrible fate, or at least a rotten time, for so many of them are ghastly.
I was quite a way into the book before I found a middle- or upper-class character whose neck I didn’t want to wring—apart from Mrs. Voyles, the Flynns’ tenant in the basement flat who is, like a bad conscience, crazy and shattered and given to saying things like “I know who you are” to Campbell. Hurrah, I thought, but even she’s frustrating and unlikeable, which is, of course, the point. Milo has all the computer skills to do an implausible amount of hacking, so destroying Campbell’s life is pretty much a walk in the park for him. In fact, the novel invites us to believe all kinds of implausible things: that an article in the Atlantic written by Campbell can be widely influential; that an academic and writer would seek to be friends with someone who is, if not exactly a gang member, then certainly affiliated with one; and that an academic and writer would invest in bitcoin.
To be fair, these have some precedents in reality. I found it harder to believe that his son would be a millionaire DJ who hops around the world on private jets; or that, come to think of it, an academic and writer would have a long-standing and happy marriage; or that a left-of-center publication would have traction in the real world.
It is possible that I have missed a rich seam of deadpan comedy running throughout Caledonian Road; but if this novel is funny, not one part of it made me laugh; if it is not meant to be funny, then it becomes much more inadvertently amusing. I am not so sure that is how novels are meant to work. But then the state of the nation is a serious business, and O’Hagan has no time for levity.
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