CALEDONIAN ROAD, by Andrew O’Hagan
London’s Caledonian Road runs through the borough of Islington, past Pentonville Prison, postwar public housing estates and rows and rows of highly coveted Georgian terraces. Prices can reach multiple millions for houses in leafy squares, while poorer residents can spend years on waiting lists for council flats. If you want to write about inequality in London — or in the United Kingdom — “the Cally,” to locals, is a good place to start.
Andrew O’Hagan’s sweeping novel takes its name from the road. His protagonist, the “celebrity academic” Campbell Flynn, has lived in well-heeled Thornhill Square for four years. It’s 2021, the tail end of the pandemic lockdown, and Flynn has just published a renowned biography of Vermeer and written a much-admired essay on “the orgy of white contrition” for The Atlantic.
But this success, O’Hagan tells us, is only temporary. From the book’s very first page, it is clear Flynn is wrong to believe he has escaped the “threats” of his childhood in impoverished Glasgow; he is about to be confronted by his “huge mistakes.” A handful of pages later — when describing Flynn and his university friend, the soon-to-be-disgraced business tycoon Sir William Byre — O’Hagan’s narrator reaches for even heavier-handed foreshadowing: “All their disasters were in front of them. All their bonds were in the past.”
Over the next 600-plus pages, O’Hagan dwells on these disasters. His subject is London’s web of connections: how Flynn’s comfortable, liberal world of academia and aristocracy (his psychotherapist wife is the daughter of a countess and the sister of a duchess) could be tied to human trafficking, money-laundering and violent crime.
The impressively varied cast of characters includes Kenzie, Flynn’s haute-bohemian daughter, who has taken to weaving after giving up modeling; and Gerry, an Irish truck driver who is moving less-than-legal cargo with a view to returning home on his proceeds. O’Hagan skates from Zak, an eco-activist who lives in a penthouse, to Izzy, a frantic fashion designer stressed about her latest collection.
Members of a North London gang called Cally Active exist in the same city as Russian oligarchs; Polish immigrants brush up against residents of “old” Islington. Mrs. Voyles, the tenant in the Flynns’ basement flat, has lived in the borough since houses used to go for 38,000 pounds.
This nexus of London life extends further, into the dark web. Flynn becomes entranced by Milo Mangasha, an enigmatic computer science student who lives near him on the Caledonian Road, but is worlds away from his privilege. Milo introduces Flynn to Bitcoin, but also puts his computer skills to other uses, hacking into the financial secrets that Flynn’s high-society friends would rather remain hidden. .
“Caledonian Road” is O’Hagan’s attempt at a state-of-the-nation novel. Its breadth (and length) rivals Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” its depiction of the underbelly of London life updates Dickens’s “Bleak House,” and its satirical delight in overreaching male folly nods to Martin Amis’s “Money” and Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
References to real events and places pepper the text: from the missed penalties in the Euro 2020 soccer championships to the posh haunts of a certain type of Londoner. (“Everything on the menu had to do either with beetroot or parsnips.”) This bingo-card of name-dropping doesn’t overshadow O’Hagan’s true focus: the city’s very real corruption; the fact that everything — from political influence to human life — is up for sale.
Flynn is a fittingly flawed guide to this underworld. His carefully constructed life of refinement is a mask that matches the city’s own facade: the glitzy art fairs and fashion shows obscuring the murk beneath.
A novel this broad has to move quickly, and depend on speech to deliver key details. O’Hagan’s dialogue can feel stilted and unnatural, particularly when ventriloquizing his cast of younger, poorer Londoners. (“The bando’s rocking, fam,” is how one of Milo’s friends describes a party in a derelict flat.) At other times, it’s his female characters who are given the most lifeless lines: Flynn’s tenant, Mrs. Voyles, tends toward cartoon crone rather than woman, and Elizabeth (his wife) and Moira (his sister) occasionally feel like little more than saintly foils. (This is a criticism that could be leveled at O’Hagan’s other work. The 2020 “Mayflies” featured two of the flimsiest female characters I have ever read.)
These qualms made me think of a moment in “Middlemarch”: the famous passage in which Eliot’s narrator declares that to know all of “ordinary human life” would be overwhelming in its roar; like “hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat.”
“Caledonian Road” is a rich, moving attempt to listen to the swell of human life, but O’Hagan occasionally falls into the same trap as his protagonist. Like the self-absorbed Flynn, he can’t quite hear all characters equally. As O’Hagan writes of Flynn’s failure to understand Mrs. Voyles, “Her reality was no longer available to him.”
CALEDONIAN ROAD | By Andrew O’Hagan | Norton | 624 pp. | $32.50
