I came to Caledonian Road -- written by Andrew O'Hagan, and published just this year -- simply because there was so much buzz about it. It was shortlisted for this year's Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and for a while it seemed to be everywhere.



As absolutely everyone tells us, it's a "state-of-the-nation" novel. The nation is Britain, and we view it through the lens of the eponymous London road. Stretching north-south through Islington, from the newly glammed up King’s Cross to the junction of the Holloway and Camden Roads, its buildings range from elegant Georgian terraces to down-at-heel housing estates. Charles Booth, a 19th-century social reformer, meticulously mapped out, street by street, working-class life in London. He ended up with 17 volumes of data. Colour-coding the different areas to produce a poverty map, he found that in Islington, rich and poor lived cheek by jowl. His map would hardly be out of place today.



Not surprisingly, then, the other descriptor that's bandied about in reviews of this novel is Dickensian. And to the extent that all life is here, it fits. Our characters -- and there are many, many of them -- include one or more rappers, peers, migrants, Russian money-launderers, human-traffickers, activists, journalists, and garment-makers.

The narrative opens in May 2021. While we in Sarawak were still languishing under an interminable lockdown, London was getting itself out and about again, and into all sorts of trouble.

I listened to the audio-version, and initially the cast of thousands was problematic (I had to download a list, featuring nearly 60 names...). But narrator Michael Abubakar quickly sorts you out. Throughout almost 23 hours of accent acrobatics -- truly a bravura performance -- he individualizes everyone.

Anchoring the whole thing is the character of Campbell Flynn, 52, art historian and celebrity academic. He writes bestsellers about art; he writes about all sorts of other things, too -- fashion, for example; plus, he does a popular podcast. He's everyone's go-to guy, very hip and happening. An ostensibly successful escapee from his working-class Glasgow background, Flynn has married into the British upper classes, and is apparently riding high. Except right at the beginning, we know he is potentially riding for a fall. He is in financial difficulties (not paying your taxes is never a good idea), and to try to make a quick buck, he has written a kind of self-help book called Why Men Weep in Their Cars, which he intends to pass off as the work of a handsome young actor, who will look great doing all the publicity, while Flynn rakes in the lion's share of the profits. What could possibly go wrong?

A number of things conspire to bring Flynn down. Mrs Voyles, the sitting tenant in the basement of his elegant house, is a genuinely horrible woman, and Flynn well and truly lets her get to him. Maybe this is partly because he has never entirely outgrown his own poor past -- which definitely has parallels with O'Hagan's own early years. The author tells Anna Russell that his character has "a little ball of pain about his mum and dad, and that’s mine.. [He has] travelled a long way from that tower block in Glasgow, but in some ways he’s still in there...[with] the fear, the sense that there’s an unpaid debt." He tells James Taylor: "Campbell wants to find his way back to a problem that was never solved... That this man, who is such a success, doesn’t feel a success, he doesn’t feel he’s ever really arrived in his life. I think that’s a thing that a lot of people feel... So, one of the things he looks back to is his past, his childhood; did he leave his essential self behind in that tower block, in Sighthill, in the North of Glasgow, did he never really, again, find this core self? Has he been projecting himself rather than being himself? That is one of the core problems for Campbell Flynn."


Glasgow, 2019 (as is the picture at the top). Taylor comments: "Caledonian Road is a deliciously panoramic, suitably thick slice of London life, encapsulating the diversely interlinking lives that intersect down the titular route. But it’s also a melancholy tribute to Glasgow, and a version of Scottish life lost to the past. Campbell Flynn, the novel’s central figure... is a tenement Glaswegian at heart beneath the criss-crossed London lattice of parties, celebrities and public controversy"

Flynn can't really help his past, or his struggles in coming to terms with it. But other things are self-inflicted. That business with the actor blows up catastrophically when the guy's ego gets the better of him, and he becomes the hero of a white male movement. The "self-help" book is torpedoed in the resultant uproar (Flynn later gets revenge by making public an old photo showing the actor in black-face -- yes, it's all very contemporary...). Additionally, Flynn's friends and family turn out to have some exceptionally dodgy connections and pasts, the tar from which definitely rubs off.

Connecting all these elements, like a venomous skewer, is Milo Mangasha. Flynn befriends this student of his, and takes him on as a research assistant. Why, when there are warning bells right from the beginning...? Well, from a mixture of motives -- a genuine desire to understand the younger generation, and to help someone less fortunate who reminds him of his younger self, but probably also a yen to burnish his liberal credentials, and look even cooler. He radically misjudges Milo, who is a man with a mission. His Ethiopian mother, already ill, was an early casualty of lockdown mismanagement, leaving him and his Irish father bereft. He wants to fight back: "To the politicians who flout their own rules, to the Establishment who backs them up, Milo swore revenge. To the liberals who think they do well by managing language, giving up nothing while they spell out the difference between one grain of sand and another, he swore exposure." An accomplished hacker, he begins the task of bringing down as many establishment figures as he can reach via Flynn's poorly guarded networks. And when he's got enough, he dumps Flynn, and watches his so-called mentor's world disintegrate.

Key to Flynn's problems is also the fact that he doesn't communicate. His children, admittedly, especially his self-obsessed son, are not easy to break through to. But why doesn't he communicate with his sensible wife, Elizabeth? She's a therapist, although I suppose it's a bit of an irony that she doesn't seem to see -- or at least doesn't engage with -- Campbell's steady path downhill. But if people won't talk to you, what do you do?

Above all -- and this is the bit I find most resonant -- Flynn can't connect his ideals and the world he's living in. At one point, he tells us ironically: "Only disconnect." This is the opposite of what E.M. Forster tells us, of course, and Flynn means it literally as the need to unplug from the web. But as Andrew van der Vlies glosses it, "The phrase could be interpreted as a recognition of the futility of trying to disconnect from the web of complicity that ensnares us all." Flynn is smart enough -- particularly under Mangasha's guidance -- to recognize all the ills of inequality and hypocrisy and cronyism to which Britain is prone, but, like most of us, he is utterly incapable of doing anything about it. He has lots -- LOTS -- of fine words, all expressed in the carefully appropriate language of the day, but he has nothing to offer. He has made himself part of this world of privilege, and he can't extract himself; he can't even deal with the element of the lower classes that he literally lives on top of. As O'Hagan says in an interview: "There’s a kind of liberal fallacy, that we think if we hold the right views, and vote the right way, and mind our language, that we are somehow protected from young people thinking we’re in the wrong." Of course, it doesn't work like that.

The ending is shocking, though not entirely surprising. You finish the book uncomfortable, turning over in your mind whether all these people could have acted differently. They could, they could, we're not pre-programmed from Day 1 -- and yet O'Hagan shows us very clearly the limitations of our choices. We will always come from where we come from; we will always have that behemoth system to contend with; we will always struggle -- until there's some radical interruptor, that we probably wouldn't like -- with the disconnect between the injustice we see around us and our will to correct it; there will always be people who are not just greedy but genuinely evil.

You realize that Flynn is acting more and more like an idiot as time goes by, and is choosing the wrong way to solve his problems every time. You deplore his stupidity and self-indulgence and ineffectualness, and are horrified by the awful stuff he ends up involved in. But you can't help but feel sorry for him. He didn't mean badly... We don't mean badly. Most of us, anyway. And yet look at what we end up with.


A stone's throw from King's Cross, a mere few weeks ago



So, there was a lot to enjoy about this book. Definitely. I would recommend it.

But there's something about it that I didn't like.

As I said, it makes you think. I couldn't get it out of my head for a while. But it's very, very bleak. If it's a state-of-the-nation novel, then Britain is pretty much doomed. There's really no-one to admire. (Tara Hastings, campaigning and conscientious journalist, perhaps comes the closest.) And yet in my world I have plenty of people to admire, so either I'm living an irredeemably sheltered and complacent life, or this is not a totally accurate picture of the way things are.

I also can't silence the feeling that there's simply too much going on... Too many characters to interpret; too many prisms to look through; too many angles to cover. Mesmerizing, but I'm not wholly sure it stuck the landing.

It's not that I think, as Hamish MacBain does, that the characters are stereotypes. You can tell that Caledonian Road is based on meticulous research. O'Hagan is a journalist, and he interviewed people from all walks of life during the decade-long writing process, and made innumerable trips to Caledonian Road. I think that comes through.

It's not even that I reject O'Hagan's conviction that he has the right to be the old-fashioned omniscient author. He tells James Taylor: "It’s different from a lot of novels you see now which are obsessed with one point of view. One of the senses in which I’m trying to interrupt that habit of solipsism which exists at the moment, is to say; you can write a book in which every single character is not like you, they do not carry your editorial [sense], your worldview, your politics... Animating what others think, seems to me still a potential project for the novel. The novel hasn’t become an auto-fictional, closed device, all about the single consciousness of the writer... I mean, Emily Bronte wasn’t Heathcliff, you know! She was a teenage girl imagining a passionate foreigner, to her. You must always remember that -- she created a masterpiece, with her mind, with her empathy and her heart. The idea that we can’t do that anymore -- that Emily Bronte [should only have] written slim novels about anorexic girls who live in the Yorkshire moors? It’s bonkers to me -- she expanded from her little body into imagining elemental, universal, Greek craziness around the Yorkshire moor, and God bless her, she made a masterpiece. And so, I’m going to take my cue from her, not from people who think we should all shush, and just pay attention to who we are ourselves."

I'm not sure quite where you draw the lines here. Appropriation is a genuine issue, and O'Hagan is certainly ambitious. But I wouldn't quarrel with him over those decisions.


The gentrification of the King's Cross area, mentioned several times in the novel. We glimpsed this development from the train on our way to Paris


The King's Cross gasholders as they used to look

I wonder whether what bothers me is the apparent similarity between O'Hagan and Flynn. Here's Russell: "Like Campbell Flynn, [O'Hagan] is a fiftysomething Scotsman who grew up on a housing estate near Glasgow and now finds himself perched at the top of the London literary scene. He’s a journalist, and editor-at-large for the London Review of Books... In the UK, where the book became a Sunday Times best-seller, it has been compared to Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities for its skewering of London society, especially the liberal intelligentsia. 'He’s needling us, and rightly so. We deserve it,' the editor-in-chief of British Esquire, Alex Bilmes, told me. Campbell Flynn 'is all of us liberal people who sit around criticizing others, whilst also benefitting from the conditions that have been created in this city.' Will Frears, who grew up with O’Hagan as a frequent dinner guest when Frears’s mother, Mary-Kay Wilmers, was editor of the L.R.B., told me, 'There were definitely more shivers of recognition than you would wish for.'... When I asked Frears if he saw any of O’Hagan in Campbell Flynn, he said, 'How could you not? He’s such a character of London. A person who gets invited to all the parties, who knows everyone, who goes to all the things, but is also kind of watching it, keeping an eye on it.'"

Am I being really unfair in thinking that there's something self-indulgent about sending your character-like-you to his doom while you sail on, feted and garlanded? That there's something unfair about so convincingly showing us the problem, but not doing anything to show us the solution? Except writing a book about it, of course... Words, more words. Always the liberal answer.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure you can be Dickensian in our post-modern age. Dickens wrote about the social evils of his time from the perspective of a clear set of moral values. We can argue, of course, about the validity of those values, but they were there, acting as a framework. But what equivalent do we have now?

Is that why I'm left with a kind of emptiness after reading this novel? With a sense that a problem has been articulated, but no clue has been given as to what to do with it or about it?

There's a line in an episode of The West Wing when the would-be Republican candidate, hearing about a senseless piece of violence, says: "Crime. Boy, I don't know..." The incumbent Democrat president takes this head-shaking powerlessness as a good reason to take him on, and wipe him out.

But Caledonian Road leaves me with a similarly overwhelmed sense of paralysis. "The world. Boy, I don't know..."