An exclusive extract from CALEDONIAN ROAD, Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel
The story so far: surrounded by members of the British aristocracy, fashion designers, Russian money and a corrupt art world, famous young British actor Jake Hart-Davies takes on a new kind of role, standing in for the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn, and pretending to be the author of a cult new self-help book. Then it all goes wrong. Massively wrong...
IT WAS WHILE FILMING THE FINAL EPISODE OF Aethon’s Curse, ‘Dance of the Blades’, that Jake Hart-Davies realised he was too big for acting. He was in Belfast Harbour Studios at the time, preparing to wrestle with a giant prehistoric frog called Beelzebufo, when he remembered that he had been born to play Hamlet or to write an era-defining novel. Instead, the make-up and costume girls were coating him in supernatural gunk, plucking his eyebrows, padding out his crotch and blow-drying the fur around his hood.
The disaffection remained in the middle of August, yet he still had hopes as an actor. Now he was down in Dorset, on the edge of a steep incline of enhanced trees and painted gorse, with high water cannons spraying the scene to indicate a deluge. ‘This could be my last,’ Jake said to himself as he nudged past extras to get to his trailer. Yet he couldn’t resist investing heavily in the part he was playing, the titular character in a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Like Hardy’s Clym Yeobright, he had returned from Paris, from everything, to blind himself with reading, and he was set to become a labouring man in touch with the pagan land. Closing the trailer door at his back, undoing his Victorian silk tie and bending down to choose one of his herbal teas, the actor, now author, said one of his lines: ‘I will invade some region of singularity, good or bad.’ And with that he leaned over for his phone and removed his Victorian spectacles. His eyes focused on a line of books above the sofa, three of them works by Campbell Flynn.
Things had kicked off at a Bournemouth hotel last night. Jake had a 5 a.m. call, but a number of the other cast members and crew had decided to destroy the bar until midnight, before taking it up to one of the rooms. The ringleader, as always, was Archie Todd, the cokehead son of a well-known celebrity chef, who had gone into acting after being in a TV boy band. Archie was last seen ordering six espresso Martinis to his room at 4 a.m. He tried to climb down a drainpipe to get away from a producer, and by the time his car came to take him to the set, he was barricaded in another room, drinking the minibar and crying on the phone to his mum. Trouble was, the bosses from Netflix were due to visit the next day to see how the production was going. Jake said to the first assistant director, mid-morning, that despite all the Druid energ y floatin
