Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan review: a thrilling, picaresque tale of London life

Culture | Books

Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan review: a thrilling, picaresque tale of London life

Few things in life are as daunting as the doorstop novel that comes complete with a glossary of the characters featured within. Over the 650 pages of Andrew O’Hagan’s latest, it warns us, we will have 59 different people to keep track of, ranging from gang members and drill rappers and actors and fashionistas to aged Tory peers and people traffickers and teachers and newspaper editors and a sitting tenant from hell.

Not as many characters as, say, Marlon James’s A Brief History Of Seven Killings (75), but still a lot of characters. And the world in which they exist reaches much further than the two-and-a-bit miles of the London street that provides the title here. Caledonian Road has been billed — rather grandly — as a “state of the nation” novel. Meaning of course that it will set out to show that the evil people at the top of society are as evil if not more evil than the evil people at the bottom stabbing their enemies because they’ve strayed into drug territory that is not theirs.

The aforementioned tenant from hell is the bane of our protagonist Campbell Flynn’s life. Flynn is like Suella Braverman’s worst nightmare: an “art historian and celebrity academic” who lives in Islington, likes champagne and socialism and probably tofu, is married to a therapist, has a sister who is a QC and an MP and a son who is a DJ. He is a bored, cynical bon vivant who swans around from famous London restaurant to famous London restaurant, sighing and reluctantly agreeing to opportunities that he feels are beneath him but make him lots of money quite easily.

Soon enough, though, this effortless wandering through life will be disrupted. He embarks on a (very far-fetched) caper with a young actor called Jake Hart-Davies. He meets an earnest young student called Milo who fascinates him for some (very far-fetched) reason. They form an unlikely friendship and starts talking about crypto — “You’re like all older people, no security awareness,” sighs Milo as they’re coming up with a Bitcoin password — and Extinction Rebellion and other such contemporary things. They have lots of “You can’t say that/But why can’t I say that” type discussions, which will be enjoyable for anyone who has bitten their lip with their own “But why can’t I say that?” when being ticked off by a teenager. Then, over the course of the year that Caledonian Road covers — it’s split into four books, each named after a season — we get to watch Campbell Flynn’s life falling apart.

This is a book that instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen

Flynn and his chattering class associates all communicate largely in one-liners — “He’s a silly as an afternoon at Ascot, but quite amusing in the same way,” says one, a countess, about another, a retail tycoon and his best friend — are a lot of fun to spend time with. O’Hagan, after all, is pretty much the same age as Campbell — mid-50s — and, as a three-time Booker Prize nominee, is probably more than au fait with these circles, and as such these encounters feel authentic and believable.

You suspect, however, that he does not regularly hang out with drill rappers and gang members: hence characters who are “talking about getting cuffed the day before when the feds stopped him under Cally Bridge”. The nasty Right-wing shock columnist, meanwhile, “said she couldn’t abide pity dependent propagandists, and in this group she included single mothers, eco-warriors, vegans, cyclists, social workers, BLM activists, Harry and Meghan, Scottish nationalists, Liverpudlians, the so-called trans community and migrants, no matter where they came from.”

The super-posh people, too, occasionally veer into cartoon territory (“Darling, I’m frightfully busy,” says one, a duke. “And the estate office is on the telephone”). There’s a non-binary character who just talks in… well, take a guess. And not that I have ever met any people traffickers, but the people traffickers often also feel like they are stretching credulity. As it transpires, however, most of them are mere peripherals to Campbell Flynn and so we are — mostly, happily —soon enough back with our main character and his scattershot, even-when-the-chips-are-down bon mots.

That character glossary, in other words, ultimately feels unnecessary: many of those many people we encounter feeling briskly drawn, talking in sentences that make it obvious who they are and where they come from, present solely to drive the plot forward. But all that said, this is still a hugely enjoyable ride: one that zips along with all kinds of twists and turns, finding ingenious links between its characters along the way. The energy never lets up, not even for a single paragraph. It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that its TV rights were long ago snapped up — John Renck of Chernobyl fame will be directing — because this is a book that instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen.

Caledonian Road (Faber & Faber, hardback, £18) is out now

Hamish MacBain is deputy editor of ES Magazine

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