Portrait of Britain’s post-Brexit berserk
Hefty, panoramic novels – what Henry James once called “big, baggy monsters” – seem a rare species these days. This isn’t because contemporary novelists lack stamina or ambition; rather, it is a reflection of the world we now live in, one of Amazon and Deliveroo, a world in which speed and efficiency trumps all else, and in which many simply lack the time to read books, never mind War and Peace or Ulysses.
In this apparently most inauspicious of contexts, an intrepid Andrew O’Hagan has gone and written a 650-page doorstopper. Caledonian Road’s immense scope easily matches its monumental scale; O’Hagan’s ambition is no less than to capture the state of contemporary Britain.
Like Dickens and Martin Amis, two London-obsessed writers in whose wake he follows, his primary means of doing so is via character. The book’s sprawling dramatis personae ranges from Russian oligarchs who can “asset strip in 15 languages” to precocious hackers, Irish hauliers and Romanian human traffickers.
At its centre is Campbell Flynn, a best-selling art historian and sometimes podcaster. From a working-class Scottish background, Flynn has married into Britain’s moribund but stubbornly enduring aristocracy. He nonetheless regards himself as the rather benign product of a supposedly meritocratic Britain who has endeavoured to keep up with the times. “[A] liberal in a bohemian sense”, he trumpets his credentials as “the proud father of a queer daughter”, one “who has read every book on the fall of empire” and who marched against Section 28, homophobic legislation introduced in the late 1980s.
But Flynn is in other ways hopelessly oblivious to his own privilege and to the risks that some in his economically and culturally diverse social circle pose. From whence, precisely, he isn’t quite sure – perhaps the book on the crisis of the white male which he has ghostwritten is going to get him cancelled?
– but Flynn senses that some disaster is imminent; “in small increments, he felt it coming.” And does it ever.
In managing to paint a plausible portrait of contemporary Britain, Caledonian Road represents a considerable achievement. Readers familiar with the country, riven as it is by extreme inequalities and governed by an irredeemable political and social elite, will find much that is recognisable. And depressing as this can be, the effect is happily leavened by plenty of biting satire.
O’Hagan is razor-sharp when it comes to generational divides, while his lampooning of Flynn’s often preposterous analyses of paintings – “in this second picture we see a man of achievement, a deeper soul, but his eyes show he lacks the innocence of a freshly embodied truth” – is entertaining.
If the book can be said to have a weakness, it relates to characterisation; sometimes, it feels like O’Hagan has maybe bitten off more than he can chew. In particular, his more peripheral characters can come across as puppet-like, and the scenes they populate, contrived. This is perhaps inevitable, given both their function as comic stand-ins for various movements and subcultures, from environmentalism to drill rap, and their sheer number; there simply isn’t the room to endow most with multidimensional complexity.
Nevertheless, at his best, O’Hagan rises to the formidable challenge he has set himself, and Caledonian Road strikes me as one of the most successful attempts yet to depict what we might call, to paraphrase the late Philip Roth, Britain’s post-Brexit berserk.