Caledonian Road is a big, magnificent novel — sold short by its title. For that puts one in mind of John Lanchester’s Capital, which explores how the people on one London street were affected by the global financial crisis of 2008. True, the Caledonian Road (which runs for a mile or two north of King’s Cross) functions as the axis of the book, with Pentonville prison and housing estates away to the right as you move out, and posh Thornhill Square to the left. But the scope of the novel is infinitely wider. Andrew O’Hagan, veteran journalist and literary prize winner — as well as an editor-at-large at the London Review of Books — ranges across the whole of London. He’s a Scot, subjecting metropolitan society to an exacting scrutiny but with a lightness of touch. It makes for a gripping read.
The central character is Campbell Flynn, a fine arts scholar who (to the chagrin of most of his department) has ventured successfully into high journalism, and even into the world of fashion. Socially he is well-connected; his wife’s sister is married to a duke. But he is a high spender, neither financially competent nor prudent. To make money, he decides to write a potboiler, Why Men Weep in Their Cars. As a study of the postulated male identity crisis, it brings complications, even though Campbell writes it anonymously and hires an actor to do the interviews.
Campbell is drifting into a malaise when the novel opens. He has made all sorts of adjustments as a good liberal, but feels something in his life is “off.” “Sometimes we need a holiday from ourselves,” he muses. He decides to take one.
At hand is Milo, a computer whiz who has taken Campbell’s course out of general interest. Campbell is struck by the young man’s self-possession, and — aware he is crossing a line, although not operating from a sexual imperative — suggests they have a drink together. This sets in motion a sequence of events that will destroy him.
For his part Milo — the son of an Irish father and an Ethiopian mother — conceals a great anger. He’s out to topple Campbell, whom he sees as fussing over Vermeer when the whole world is changing. “This is a white court. White officers, white barristers, white jury,” he shouts out when a friend is put on trial. He knows his friends have been bothered by the police all their lives, stopped, searched, called anti-social. “Then Travis [who is being tried] does something stupid and justice must be served. It hurt to think about it.” Correctly seeing the internet as the central nervous system of the world, Milo plans to use his skills to pole vault himself away to a safe place.
In the meantime, there is the professor. Gradually Milo comes to influence him more and more, to the point where he determines the tone of an important lecture Campbell is giving at the British Museum. The place is a “Fagin’s Lair” of stolen treasures, the professor declares; in this beautiful room “we populate and celebrate our nation’s criminality, at a ruinous cost to our modernity.”
Milo shows the professor the dark web, introduces him to Bitcoin, and then starts to crack open Campbell’s connections, with devastating results — for him and others.
The point O’Hagan constantly makes is that England itself is in a churn. You could say — as one of the characters does — that the whole country is on life support. Meanwhile the old insouciance of the upper classes is gone, often replaced by lapsed standards of personal behaviour. The ideal of “effortless superiority,” vaunted a century ago, was premised on empire — all gone. Or rather, it’s now among them, for these days almost 40 per cent of Londoners are foreign-born. The royals themselves are on the way out, despite their talent for always behaving in public “as if enjoying a glorious privacy.” O’Hagan also enjoys himself by slipping in the names of families once well-known, now less so: Eardley, Hicks Beach, Wemyss. Or using Dickens’s early penname “Boz” as the nickname for a migration racketeer and inverting E.M. Forster to create the maxim, “Only disconnect.” At the same time, he uses a fine performance of the Purcell song “Fairest Isle” to make the culture it represents seem isolated and irrelevant.
Campbell’s sister Moira is a Labour member of parliament. But there too there is disillusionment. (Presumably a little less so right now.) Labour, she reflects, used to be about working people, decency and fairness. But what now? What if the people stop voting for that? she asks. As another character observes, people will vote Trump-like against their own interests, simply because they hate the caring “elites” — “Islington garden-square hypocrites,” they are dubbed here — elites who like to tell them what is good for them. It might be that people “don’t mind being exploited so long as they can choose it themselves.”
The word “disruption” scarcely appears in the text, but discontinuities are everywhere. A young woman notes of her party-giving university contemporaries that “each existed at variance with his father.” There are many parties in the book, where gender fluidity is taken for granted. Some of the biggest are centred on gallery openings. The artworld is now populated with ex-bankers, who hold that authenticity is over-valued. (If people like a thing, they like it.) The whole shallow scene is marked by conspicuous consumption: Campbell’s flashy son insists on giving his father a big birthday party in Reykjavik — since the curry served in a restaurant there is the best in the world.
The past is ignored: it’s Milo who says, “Fuck Henry James. We’re on the Net,” but the sentiment is general. Everything’s ironic, or speedy. Some friends settle down to watch Netflix, but can’t agree on what to watch, so settle for two minutes of everything. And yet while O’Hagan takes pot shots at the trendiness of climate change — the trendiness, not the issue — there’s a younger character who puts a frivolous past behind him to become a highly effective activist for the cause. He also points to the integrity of the young journalist Tara Hastings.
The novel is particularly good in exploring the influence of the Russians in “Londongrad,” as it has been termed. We’re made aware of the “London laundromat” involving dirty Russian money, much of it processed by mainline British banks and then siphoned away into various companies. As one of the oligarchs quietly boasts, “I can asset-strip in fifteen languages.” Little of all this has been exposed, at least effectively: even a parliamentary committee plasters it over. The Russians, the novelist maintains, are in too deep — excluded people have been reinstated and given sinecures in the universities, a cohort have been active in arts patronage, and a few have been given seats in the House of Lords. Hefty Russian loans have compromised major businessmen and other leading figures.
One of them, it transpires, is Campbell’s wife’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Kendal. Campbell doesn’t particularly like him, since he’s a twitterer: a man “obsessed with social relations but clueless about social ease.” It turns out he’s doubly disgraced, by right-wing remarks that have gone viral but also by his being caught up in Russian financial schemes. “This country might be overrun by the wrong sort,” he’s heard to reflect, “but these people were men of business.” And, despite his difficulties, he comes through: they were just an embarrassment. A pillar of the establishment, with tradition, estates (and lawyers) plus royal cousins, he is (you might say) too grand to fail.
But the picture on the ground is not pretty. O’Hagan introduces us to people-smuggling, in which the Harrow-educated son of one of the oligarchs is deeply implicated. It is linked with the growing drug trade, the people transported often finding themselves enslaved on cannabis farms. Among other things the novel follows some Irish drivers, with their hopes and thoughts, and also a young Polish gay couple intent on making the journey. (Their story entails a snapshot of Bialystok). But we’re also given some of the nitty-gritty of the journey: drivers knock on the containers once they’ve pulled up, alerting the people inside to move to the centre so as to beat the heat scanners down at the port.
Caledonian Road is a fine novel, carefully plotted and with an ominous tone quietly surfacing from time to time. In part Campbell functions as an analogue for the decline of English liberal culture; his adversary the elderly Mrs Voyles, scratchy, bohemian and poor, for the England that’s been left behind. The characterisation generally is compelling — particularly in the case of Campbell’s wife, the immensely sane Elizabeth, who happens to be a therapist. Her mother, a wry aristocrat, is a delight; but O’Hagan is just as good and revealing about the assumptions of dunderheads like the Duke. His one caricature is of an Australian sculptor, a Dame; she, fortunately, occupies less than a page. Generally the novel is so sharply written that parts of it are just a notch or two away from satire. It abounds with neat phrases, such as Campbell’s “capable smile.”
A lot of Andrew O’Hagan has gone into this novel — in one sense Campbell, who also started as a Scots working class boy, provides a shadow scenario of what he could have become, and avoided. A Caledonian road then, in more ways than one.
More importantly, O’Hagan exemplifies V.S. Naipaul’s precept that “The novel is a form of social inquiry.” This is a Condition-of-England novel, an established nineteenth-century genre. Indeed, had it not been pre-empted by Trollope, its title could well have been The Way We Live Now. •
