Esquire is a style magazine with a literary bent. We believe in being well dressed, naturally.
Also, in being well read. You don’t have to be a decorated man of letters to cut a dash, but erudition, lightly worn, is every bit as chic as a sharply tailored jacket over a crisp white shirt.
This issue, as ever, we offer a distinctive look at the latest in men’s fashion — check out our troglodytic spring/summer collections shoot, from page 138, and mar vel at the best-dressed cavemen since Fred Flintstone knotted his last necktie — alongside new work from some of the most accomplished writers currently putting fingertips to keyboards.
Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, which publishes in April, is a big, ambitious, rambunctious story of modern London life, and it will surely prove to be the most talked-about British novel of 2024. You won’t have to read it. But if you choose not to, don’t expect anyone to think you’re clever, or sexy. I am proud to publish the first extract in this issue: a sneak preview, for Esquire readers only, of one of the literary events of the year.
Caledonian Road, which opens in the spring of 2021, concerns the fall from grace of Campbell Flynn, a 52-year-old quasi- celebrity smoothie: public intellectual, bestselling art historian, well-heeled man about town, “a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit”. When first we meet him, Campbell, who grew up working class in Scotland (the clue’s in the title), is cosily nuzzled in the bosom of the haute bourgeoisie. He lives in a smart house in Islington with his posh therapist wife. His sister is a Labour MP. Her sister is the Duchess of Kendal. They have two kids: a former model, and a gormless superstar DJ. (“This dhal is insane”. Etc.) Campbell teaches a course on “Culture and the Self ” at UCL. Well of course he does.
But something is up with Campbell. He’s disorientated. Dizzy. He’s suffering from “spatial problems” and “a lack of solidity”. Some sort of “dislodgement” has occurred. His face, we are told, “is temporary”.
Campbell is unmoored. He has become “a traitor to the class of his youth and a freak to his own moral understanding”. The art historian is forever pictured gazing at something — a painting, a mirror, the view from a window, his phone. He sees things beautifully, we are told, “but only the things he wanted to see”.
Caledonian Road, to borrow a description of a Campbell Flynn podcast, is a “deep dive into the era’s shallows”, a reckoning with the “nonsense of now”.
It’s a Victorian-style state-of-the-nation novel of the kind that nobody attempts any more. A comedy of manners that is also a grenadelobbing assault on the hypocrisy, entitlem
