O’hagan on how TV box-set dramas influenced new novel
It has taken him the best part of a decade to complete his eagerly-awaited new “stateof-the nation” novel.
Now one of Scotland’s bestknown authors has revealed that it has already been snapped up for a TV adaptation set to run for years.
The makers of Slow Horses and Chernobyl will be working on Caledonian Road, the show based on Andrew O’hagan’s “Dickensian” exploration of high society and establishment corruption in postbrexit, post-pandemic London.
Days after the book’s publication, the glasgow born author has admitted Caledonian Road, which boasts around 60 characters who are listed at the start of the novel, was influenced by the impact of long-running box-set dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
O’hagan was speaking at a launch event in Edinburgh for his 641-page novel, which focuses on the downfall of a Scottish art historian, critic and celebrity intellectual, Campell Flynn.
The official announcement of the TV adaptation promises “a biting portrait of modern British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising―and declining― for tunes ”.
Caledonian Road is expected to be directed by Johan Renck, the Emmy Award-winning director ofhbo series chernobyl, who will also co-produce the drama. O’hagan’s novel will be adapted by screen writer Will Smith, who is best known as the showrunner of Slow Horses, the hit spy thriller drama starring Jack Lowden and Gary Oldman. The author, who will be executive producer of the Caledonian Road series, has said his new book “couldn’t be in better hands” for a TV adaptation.
His previous semi-autobiographical novel Mayflies was adapted into an award-winning two-part BBC series starring Martin Compston and Tony Curran.
O’hagan, a former Booker Prize nominee, has described his new book as “a social saga about power, corruption and lies, about an intelligent man’s fall from grace and the instability of reality in contemporary London”.
Speaking at an in-conversation event with author Kirstin Innes at Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh, O’hagan said: “It’s a lovely team I’m involved with – they’re great people.
“One of the things they have said is that they see Ca led on ianroad is being a huge returning series with one of the big streamers.
“They said to me at a meeting the other day: ‘Are you going to write a sequel?’ I told them that was their job! they can take the characters into their hinterlands, in the way that The Wire and The Sopranos did. They started off with the characters in the pilots.
“I don’t know that it will be me that finds the new lives for them. I would encourage them to go where they’d like to go."
Asked if was now writing with possible screen adaptations in mind, O’hagan said: “For the first time, I think, it is possible for writers who think of themselvesas social novelists to take in another layer of narrative energy.
“It’s to do with how those big narratives unfold in ‘box-set world.’
“As someone who has grown up with The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, I love the idea that you can do a television novel, where characters grow and change, complexities emerge and you’ re fully entertained and wrapped up in their lives.”