The professor’s study was like a painting. It had a sofa and a table that ran along the back, two lamps and jars of pens. The desk had an antique globe on it and a lot of paper folders. It faced glass doors that led onto a balcony overlooking the garden at the back, towards the shops on Caledonian Road. The garden was full of flowers and his wife was down there, watering the plants. On a bookcase to the side of the desk was a typewriter and Milo saw various piles of books; on top of one of them was a watch and a passport.
The publisher’s blurb calls Caledonian Road a “state-of-the-nation novel”, and that is precisely what it is. Opening in May of 2021 and covering nearly a year — from the loosening of pandemic restrictions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — big events play out in the background as a wide range of characters experience life in the heart of London in ways that precisely capture the mood of our times: this is one of those rare novels that I can imagine people reading long into the future to see how we lived and thought in this moment. Author Andrew O’Hagan explores issues of class and race and justice along Caledonian Road’s mile and a half length — a North London thoroughfare famous for its high ethnic diversity and staggering disparity of wealth — and through conversations held between a variety of characters, a large breadth of ideas are offered and challenged. This is epic in scope and succeeds completely. This will, no doubt, be huge for O’Hagan upon release in 2024 and I am grateful for the early access. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As he sifted through the ties, he knew the truth. Campbell would continue persuading himself that his book was a ripe and playful intellectual riposte to the times they were living through, but in fact he’d just needed the money. He lived with his duplicity as if it was an energy. He failed to see the danger in any of it. He had identified a daft subject with Why Men Weep in Their Cars, a daft subject he had immediately commodified to his own advantage, hoping it would be the huge bestseller that might relieve him.
Campbell Flynn is a celebrity intellectual: climbing from humble Glaswegian roots, he met a higher class of people at Cambridge (his best friend would go on to earn a knighthood, Campbell himself married the daughter of a Countess), and on the basis of a celebrated biography of the painter Vermeer, Campbell landed a lectureship at University College (despite not having a PhD), hosts a popular podcast, writes for fashion and news magazines, and has anonymously written a maybe-tongue-in-cheek self-help book for the “easy” money. Fresh on the heels of penning a controversial essay on the vanity behind liberal guilt for The Atlantic, Campbell begins a working relationship with one of his former students, Milo Manghasa, speaking here:
“Mum used to say it was the genuine task in anybody’s life, to find your country.”
“I can see her pencil markings in the book,” Gosia said.
“It’s the thing she always talked about. She dreamed of it, her Highlands again, after her own long journey. But I never knew, really, if she meant home — like Ethiopia — or there,” he said, pointing to the book.
“Maybe she meant both, the old place and the new place,” Gosia said. “She dreamed of a road that carried the old road with it, right back to the start.” Her face was lit up when she said that, and Milo nodded.
“Like Caledonian Road,” he said.
Milo has a Masters in Computer Science, and with an Irish father and an Ethiopian mother, he’s from the poorer side of Caledonian Road; still rubbing elbows with the boyhood friends who are now gangbanging wannabe rapstars while joining Campbell for drinks at his exclusive club and challenging the professor’s own performative liberalism. This relationship delights and energises Campbell — he’s the kind of guy who thinks that unquestioningly accepting his queer daughter’s nonbinary partner means that he has nothing to learn about the world, but Milo challenges him on everything — so Campbell makes himself vulnerable to actions that Milo considers “an experiment in justice” (for example: when small amounts of money from Campbell’s bank accounts are redirected to charity without his prior knowledge, Campbell is both delighted by Milo’s presumed hacking skills and open to experiencing whatever Milo has in mind for him next.)
At one point, Milo says to Campbell, “We are who we know.” And while that’s meant to stain Campbell with the sins of his friends (Campbell’s best friend, William, is under investigation for various business-related crimes and at risk of losing his knighthood; Campbell’s sister-in-law is married to a Duke whose offences might run even deeper), there is irony in knowing who Milo consorts with: his oldest friend is a knife-toting weed-dealer and Milo’s girlfriend, Gosia, is the sister of a drug and human trafficker (who, ironically, imports the slave labour for Campbell’s best friend’s sweatshops). There are many levels at which people are interconnected — with Campbell and Milo both being basically decent people wanting a better world at the centre of the circles — and insanely wealthy Russian kleptocrats keeping the circles spinning with their money-laundering and influence-peddling. Throw in Campbell’s wife (an astute therapist), their son Angus (a jet-setting celebrity DJ who makes more money than his parents), their daughter Kenzie (beautiful enough to have worked as a model, but interested in a simpler life), Campbell’s sister Moira (a lawyer and sitting Member of Parliament), various journalists, Lords, and working-class folks, and there is a huge variety of experience and opinion explored; all of it adding up to a recognisable snapshot of our modern experience.
A sampling of quotes:
• Police invented the sickness they prosecute. Filing false reports, lying under oath, planting evidence, controlling the streets, kneeling on people’s necks. You talk about assault: police invented that stuff, and they get lucky every day because you want to play their game. You talk about Tupac being a gangster. That’s where he failed. He was a philosopher. He was the son of a Black Panther. He got lost, bro.
• Campbell needed William the way some people need to smoke, or the way others need to gamble or drink to excess. William was one of his risks. His outer limit. We need a friend who embodies the extent of ourselves.
• The house of cards inside us becomes shaky when we realise, one day, that we breathe like our parents and are nervous like them to hold the world steady.
• The Conservatives’ field day will come to an end when people at home realise, as they must, that the Britain being fetishised by the Tories doesn’t actually exist. It died in the 1980s.
• The Duke was doing what he always did on these occasions, making a dick of himself, as Campbell saw it, booming and guffawing his way round the various circles of guests, with the old-fashioned aristocrat’s tin-eared notion of party talk, obsessed with social relations but clueless about social ease.
• That’s what they do, the young, thought Campbell. When they hear something funny they say ‘that’s funny’ instead of laughing. Maybe that’s what postmodernism was in the end: the naming of emotion, as opposed to having it.
• All these new ventures of his into social theory and politics, current affairs and self-help. He’d told her it was research, and she trusted him as a writer, a kind of moral adventurer, wrong half the time. Her mother always said Campbell was as good as a novel, and that was true, for the most part, but the Countess never said who wrote it or how it would end.
• “I used to know which part of the nation’s struggle we represented,”’ she said.
“Working people. Decency and fairness.”
“That’s right. But what if working people stop voting for that?”
• “You know the Russians paid for Brexit, right? It was their money that made the Tories believe London was invincible.”
As much as I recognise the progressive themes that are being advocated for in this novel, the particular details are very specific to Caledonian Road/London/Great Britain and I am looking forward to seeing what local readers make of this. The Russians, The Firm, Brexit, local Councils: there are power dynamics here that I recognise without really knowing, so I can only really conclude that, to an outsider, O’Hagan totally captured the state-of-his-nation.
He’d always felt shielded by irony and art’s mysteries, but sitting in his cosy hut, it again occurred to Campbell that he was not above it all. Maybe that’s the way a crisis gathers force and dimension in a person’s life, when anxiety metastasises from one damaged area to another.
Running to epic length — six hundred and some pages — there is plenty of engaging plot in Caledonian Road, but it did feel a bit long. And if I had another complaint: the women characters are less interesting than the men; either saintly, brainy, and beautiful (like Campbell’s wife, sister, and daughter; Milo’s girlfriend) or self-serving and nasty (like William’s wife or “the woman downstairs”), but where it focuses on men, this could also be taken as a state-of-the-male novel; there is a reason, after all, that Campbell saw a market for a self-help book entitled “Why Men Weep in Their Cars”, and I was interested in the whole thing. I can’t give fewer than the full five stars.
