BOOKS
A sweeping tale of how class, culture and cash can bisect and blur in London’s media landscape, Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road is a multi-faceted portrait of the city as it stands today
ANDREW O’HAGAN HAS ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM WITH THE TERM ‘state of the nation novel’. It’s precisely what he set out to do in Caledonian Road, an expansive book that boldly traverses contemporary culture from the art and media scenes to the fortunes of shady Russian billionaires and the shocking consequences of human trafficking.
It’s a rich story in many senses of the word, which illuminates, in a way that only the best fiction can, where we find ourselves in 2024.
Sitting with a glass of champagne in Ochre, the stylish restaurant at the National Gallery, O’Hagan sets out his stall. ‘I wanted to get as close to today as possible, and to give a taste of where we’ve just been. There was a sense of hangover, of collapse, in the post-Covid moment and I wanted to refine it and present it in dramatic terms,’ he says, going on to explain that a decade of research is also behind his novel. ‘I could see that all the themes I’d been investing in for all those years would absolutely sing out.’
O’Hagan’s whole career has been building towards this. His previous novel, Mayflies, was a moving account of a friendship that blossomed in post-punk Eighties Britain and resonated into the present day: published during lockdown, it was his best-selling book, striking a chord with readers before being made into a successful drama by the BBC. ‘It came out at a moment when everyone was questioning what mattered in their lives and wondering if they’d ever be shoulder-to-shoulder at a gig with their best friends again. I couldn’t have planned for that,’ he says now.
Born in Glasgow to a working-class family, O’Hagan came to London in 1991 with his bus fare, a borrowed suit from his brother and not much else; he swiftly established himself as a perceptive observer of, well, pretty much everything. His novels have been long- and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; his non-fiction has covered the worlds of fashion, cryptocurrency, British politics – and a stint as a ghostwriter for Julian Assange. Curiosity and empathy shine through the pages of his fiction, which is also enriched by years of honing his journalistic skills.
Caledonian Road ’s protagonist is Campbell Flynn, an art critic, media personality and the author of a bestselling Vermeer biography. He has come a long way from the poverty of his own Scottish childhood as he consorts with moguls and models, dressed in beautiful clothes. But all is not quite what it seems: Flynn has more money troubles than he will reveal to his wife Elizabeth, while an old friendship with the fast-fashion magnate Sir William Byre begins to shift from advantage to liability
