LITERARYFICTION

ANTHONY CUMMINS

CALEDONIAN ROAD

by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber £20, 656pp)

O’HAGAN’S long-awaited panorama of London life is a whirlwind of backbiting aristocrats and murderous teenage gangs, trafficked seamstresses and put-upon MPs — all of them touched by dodgy money from Russia, whether they know it or not.

At the core of the 100mph plot is Campbell, a class-crossing celebrity don whose druggy midlife crisis deepens after he’s duped by his researcher, Milo, a young Irish-Ethiopian hacker.

The ingredients promise much but the result, unfortunately, is a letdown, hobbled by artlessly perfunctory scene-making that turns most of the book’s 50-strong cast into a nearrobotic vessel for plot exposition.

True, O’Hagan’s tic of using brand names — clothes, stationery, fragrance — to do the hard yards of characterisation does bear fruit in a climactic courtroom scene turning on a particular make of trainer.

There are a couple of good moments but overall, it feels like an outline awaiting the magic of a TV adaptation.

LEVITATION FOR BEGINNERS

by suzannah Dunn (Abacus £20, 272pp)

DUNN’S 15th book departs from the historical fiction for which she has gained a reputation. Here, she’s looking back not four centuries but 50 years, as her middle-aged narrator, Deborah, recalls being a troubled ten-year-old shutting out gossip at school with daydreams about Tutankhamun.

It all changes when her classmates are sent into a tizz when new girl Sarah-Jayne arrives, an army daughter back in England from Germany.

An emotional churn ensues as SarahJayne catches the eye of the young bricklayer with whom Deborah’s widowed mother has become friends.

Companionably narrated, this is a bittersweet, nostalgia-tinged adventure, saturated in contemporary pop culture, with a steadily growing voltage from slow-build jeopardy and regular jolts of irony in Deborah’s hindered understanding of her life as a child.

CHOICE

by Neel Mukherjee (Atlantic £18.99, 320pp) MUKHERJEE, a terrific novelist, isn’t short of plaudits — he was up for the Booker ten years ago — yet still seems under the radar.

Like his previous book, A State Of Freedom, Choice gives us an engrossing suite of obliquely linked tales.

The first follows dad-of-two Ayush, a publisher quietly disgusted by the hypocrisy of white-led diversity initiatives in his industry. Also in London, we have Emily, an academic expert on 16th-century poetry, now eyeing a move into fiction after a road accident brings her into the orbit of an Eritrean refugee in need of a kidney.

Finally, we move to rural India, to a family thrown into chaos when given a cow meant to lift them out of poverty.

While Mukherjee leaves it to you to decide what it adds up to, each scenario buzzes with taut drama and waspish satire amid the bitter resonance of the title, a buzzword of freemarket economics.