Book review: A Dickensian portrait of Britain

In 'Caledonian Road' London emerges as a gleaming cityscape transformed by Russian money, where gaping inequalities fester pronounced resentments

Andrew O’Hagan's 'Caledonian Road' is an ambitious, 640-page chronicle of modern Britain.

• Caledonian Road 
• Andrew O'Hagan 
• Faber & Faber, €19.99 

Such is the scope and ambition of Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road that the novel is prefaced with a list of its 59 characters.

This sprawling, 640-page portrait of contemporary Britain includes an acerbic Russian oligarch (“You are my son, but you are nothing”), literary agents, people smugglers, haulage drivers, rappers, an actor, a “chutney heiress”, and an obnoxious columnist (“Great societies depend on elites”).

Loosely connecting these disparate threads is 52-year-old Campbell Flynn, an art historian who has become a celebrity academic due to the popularity of his biography of Vermeer.

He owns houses in London and Suffolk, wears handmade shirts, and, through marriage, is related to the aristocracy. 

But Flynn grew up in a high-rise in Glasgow and he gives the impression of not caring about money, “while the issue was fomenting a riot in his secret self”.

Set in London in 2021 and tracking Flynn’s tumultuous public fall from grace, this kaleidoscopic, state-of-the-nation novel explores money, politics, class, generational divides, and the culture wars in post-Brexit Britain.

As it unfolds over a year, Flynn’s crisis is precipitated by internal malaise (he feels “disgust at the self-delighted swagger” of his voice in his BBC podcast) and external struggles, including the spectacular backfiring of a zeitgeist-baiting, self-help book he ghostwrites about masculinity (Why Men Weep in Their Cars).

Most importantly, the protagonist makes friends with Milo Mangasha, a university student and son of a Tipperary father and Ethiopian mother, to better understand his own privilege.

As Milo introduces his mentor to cryptocurrency and the Dark Web, Flynn’s attitudes and loyalties are disrupted, blinding him to his protégé’s ulterior motives.

“The world’s changing,” Milo tells Flynn. “It’s due a complete reset.”

O’Hagan is a journalist and writer, and Caledonian Road is his seventh novel. Like the author, Flynn is the son of a Glaswegian joiner who has forged a life in writing in London.

O’Hagan presents us with a liberal protagonist (“proud father of a queer daughter, the first into pronoun therapy”), but plants seeds about Flynn’s hidden side (“his handwriting was much nicer than he was”).

Tellingly, the character’s biography of Vermeer suggests “unknowability” is a fundamental part of all lives and, amid its larger themes, the idea that we understand very little of even those with whom we are closest is a touchstone of Caledonian Road.

In the novel’s panoramic, Dickensian sweep, London (“the best of all laundering-places”) emerges as a gleaming cityscape transformed by Russian money, where gaping inequalities fester pronounced resentments.

Ten years in the writing, O’Hagan’s book strains to effectively weave the multiple strands of this doorstopper into a coherent narrative and some minor, underwritten characters seem like they are included to represent particular social movements, such as environmental activism.

The chemistry of this epic novel is its depiction of the effects of cancel culture (“The future belongs to those who know how to apologise”).

O’Hagan gleefully skewers a “correctness vigilante” and when a journalist challenges Flynn about his lifelong association with a retail tycoon now facing allegations of fraud and sexual abuse, the protagonist reminds her of context (“old friendship is a thing”).

Caledonian Road is also a pin-sharp comedy of manners.

Touchingly, when Flynn’s daughter was 12 he introduced her to the work of Oscar Wilde to help her accept her burgeoning recognition that she was gay. 

The novel is embroidered with Wildean aphorisms and the putdowns of right-wing columnist Antonia Byre (she dismisses low-cost airlines as “Chav Air”) echo Lady Bracknell.

“Fate decides these things,” Flynn tells Byre. “Or the Daily Mail — I’ve never been able to tell the difference in this country.”