Book review: Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, an epic portrayal of the corruption and inequity corroding the soul of modern London, stretches to nearly 650 pages. It doesn’t take long to start wondering: who does O’Hagan think he is? Charles Dickens?
With its sweeps between light and darkness, its social satire and huge, multilayered cast, the novel shares timeless qualities with the great chronicler of London life. That is meant as a compliment. O’Hagan’s descriptions of the streets of London, its cafes and bars, sounds and smells, are transporting.
But Caledonian Road is a mighty leap, much less intimate than O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies, his heartfelt tribute to a close friend.
A Glaswegian journalist-essayist-fiction writer long based in London, O’Hagan uses Caledonian Road as a platform to explore some of the forces weakening the capital’s political and financial systems, and the effects on its citizens. It’s a horror show of a stagnant economy manipulated by outside powers, its decline accelerated by Brexit. O’Hagan also draws a grating picture of the careless excesses of the uber-wealthy.
This ecosystem is populated by a dizzying array of broke aristocrats and grifting politicians, crooked business tycoons with knighthoods, Russian oligarchs, money-laundering art dealers, human traffickers, sweat-shop workers, drug dealers. Many just appear as emblems of a type, then vanish.
Some of O’Hagan’s people move towards terrible outcomes, mirroring reportage of true news stories. He also tries to portray the sheer gall of influential Brits linked to Russian and Saudi money. But he’s just scraping the surface in this slippery territory, even in a work this size.
What anchors his parade of disparates is the road of the title. All of the characters have connections to the London borough of Islington, traversed by the historic Caledonian Rd. One of the most densely populated areas of Britain, Islington symbolises the state of the nation, measured by housing: a mix of incoming wealthy property owners and locals living in council estates, rentals and squats. A mood of discontent prevails.
Two men from each end of the borough’s divide comprise the centre of Caledonian Road’s busy dynamics: a white professor and one of his young university friends, who is black. Campbell Flynn, “tall and sharp at 52″, is a celebrity art history academic, podcaster and spendthrift who lives in a posh house in Thornhill Square with his aristocratic wife, Elizabeth. Their shield of aloof splendour is pierced by the sitting tenant in the basement, Mrs Voyles, who has been there for 40 years, protected by council regulations.
Flynn – a working-class Glaswegian like O’Hagan – is drowning in debt but has a cunning plan. The novel opens with Covid still lurking in May 2021, and he is striding through Mayfair to meet his agent to discuss his new book. The brilliance of its money-making potential staggers even him. Flynn’s Why Men Weep in Their Cars, an “airport wisdom” self-help tome, won’t be published under his name. It will be released as written by someone else, a vain, extremely stupid young actor called Jake. Jake’s ensuing blundering is an amusing distraction, though I wish O’Hagan had focused more closely on the burgeoning friendship between Flynn and his student, Milo Mangasha.
Milo is a masters student at University College London, where Flynn teaches occasionally. He lives on Caledonian Rd, not far from Flynn. The professor becomes obsessed with Milo, whose recently deceased mother was an Ethiopian refugee while his father is Irish. Milo is highly intelligent and politically aware. He, too, has a cunning plan. Milo and his girlfriend, Gosia, have been researching Flynn, his family and friends for some time.
The behaviour of some of these people cements their decision that Flynn is just as culpable and therefore a target. Milo’s broad strategy includes undermining and flipping around the prof’s white-imperialist perspective. The process kicks off in the National Gallery, where Flynn, doing a podcast for the BBC, invites Milo to join him on level 2 and witness his sermonising on the Dutch Golden Age. As they proceed through the rooms, Flynn points out – as though it was a good thing – that one of the newly acquired paintings was donated by a late banker’s estate in lieu of tax.
“I bet it was,” says Milo.
Flynn doesn’t pay tax either – and Milo knows it.
And so the book’s most elemental power play begins, a partnership that culminates in Flynn’s British Museum lecture, attended by a crowd of luvvies including Grayson Perry “wearing a dress so pink it appeared to blush at itself”.
Wait until they hear the lecture. As Flynn signs off, to cries of “Shame!”, note that this turning point ends on page 403. That leaves O’Hagan with a whole lot of pages to complete, confirming the wise adage (yes, Dickens) that money makes us “always more or less miserable”.
