By James Ley
FICTION
Caledonian Road
Andrew O’Hagan
Faber & Faber, $34.99
Apologies to the late William Gass if I am misremembering, but I seem to recall him saying somewhere that the predominant literary form of the 20th century was the 19th century novel. The form is still ubiquitous, or at least conspicuous, well into the third decade of the 21st century.
A champion of the high modernist traditions of experimentation and formal rigour, Gass was predisposed to deplore the lack of ambition and general slackness that characterises far too much fiction. And he had a point. We no longer live in the world of Dickens and Gaskell, so it is not unreasonable to maintain that the contemporary novel has no business emulating them.
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, is set in post-Brexit Britain and features an ensemble of characters.Credit: Getty
But there are some reasons why the basic template has proved so durable. When it is done well, as it is in Andrew O’Hagan’s hefty new novel, Caledonian Road, panoramic social realism can expose the inner workings of a society. The ability to move between social strata, dramatise the entangled lives of a large cast of characters in an agreeable “marriage of art and melodrama” (as O’Hagan has a character observe with reference to Balzac), inclines the form towards satirical observation and social critique.
O’Hagan is as known for his impressive body of reportage as his fiction. Caledonian Road, his seventh novel, which follows Mayflies, is smartly plotted, eminently readable and often amusing; it is also a scathing portrait of a society steeped in corruption. Set in a post-Brexit London described at one point as “the world capital of diseased finance”, it depicts a nation that has been hollowed out, materially and ethically.
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. Credit:
The novel is populous enough to be prefaced with a handy two-page list of characters, but its central figure is Campbell Flynn, an art historian in his early 50s, a sort of off-brand Simon Schama, whose major achievement is to have written a popular biography of Vermeer larded with liberal-humanist platitudes that its readers have mistaken for profundities. Campbell has fallen upwards in life. He comes from a humble Scottish family, but has married into the aristocracy and now consorts with the wealthy and powerful.
Early in the novel, we learn that he is in financial trouble. Reluctant to admit this to his family, he plans to dig himself out of the hole with an ideologically dodgy potboiler called Why Men Weep in Their Cars, aimed squarely at the lucrative self-help market. To protect his reputation from this gauche undertaking, he enlists an actor to pretend to be the book’s author. The plan does not go well.
Campbell has just enough self-awareness to sense that the world is leaving him and his stale ideas behind. He becomes fascinated with a perspicacious young student named Milo, the computer-literate son of an Ethiopian-born activist, who seems to understand the present in ways Campbell does not. In cultivating Milo’s friendship, Campbell hopes to draw on his student’s insights to reinvigorate his thinking and better navigate the fraught cultural politics of the times. This plan also does not go well.
Around Campbell and Milo, O’Hagan constructs a topical novel full of sharp observations and incorporating an array of representative figures: an unscrupulous Thatcherite businessman and his inflammatory right-wing columnist wife; a Russian oligarch who boasts that he can “asset-strip in 15 languages” and his arrogant playboy son; Milo’s drill-rapper friends, Big Pharma, Lloyds and Sluggz (real names Devan, Jeremiah and Sebastian); a hard-nosed investigative journalist; and a token non-binary character who drifts through the novel to no great purpose.
“We want stories where everybody is against type,” O’Hagan has Campbell observe near the end of the novel, in a line that could be read as a pre-emptive defence, “but such stories have no reality.” The first proposition is false, but the second is true enough.
“We” do, in fact, want stories about recognisable types because they remind us that no one escapes their measure of typicality. The legible quality reflects the characters’ individual flaws and limitations, but it also speaks to their social existence, their implication in a wider scheme of which they are only partially aware.
It is significant that, as Campbell’s life unravels over the course of the novel, Milo’s hacking skills become the driver of the plot, which involves a cascading series of tragedies and downfalls. His technical ability allows him to understand more than his would-be mentor, who is repeatedly blindsided, and thus exercise a greater control over his own fate.
In a sense, Milo becomes the author of the novel because he is its most adept reader. He has the clearest view of the inconsistency with which justice is applied in a world marked by rampant exploitation and vast material inequalities, the surest grasp of what it means to live in a society that has become a swamp of money laundering, drug dealing, feuding gangs, people smuggling and sweatshops full of immiserated immigrants.
The iniquitous world of Dickens and Gaskell, it turns out, is not as distant as one might hope.
Andrew O’Hagan is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au). The Age is a festival partner.
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