A tinderbox in a Savile Row suit
Esquire is a style magazine with a literary bent. We believe in being well dressed, naturally. Also, in being well read. You don’t have to be a decorated man of letters to cut a dash, but erudition, lightly worn, is every bit as chic as a sharply tailored jacket over a crisp white shirt.
This issue, as ever, we offer a distinctive look at the latest in men’s fashion — check out our troglodytic spring/summer collections shoot, from page 138, and marvel at the best-dressed cavemen since Fred Flintstone knotted his last necktie — alongside new work from some of the most accomplished writers currently putting fingertips to keyboards.
Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, which publishes in April, is a big, ambitious, rambunctious story of modern London life, and it will surely prove to be the most talked-about British novel of 2024. You won’t have to read it. But if you choose not to, don’t expect anyone to think you’re clever, or sexy. I am proud to publish the first extract in this issue: a sneak preview, for Esquire readers only, of one of the literary events of the year.
Caledonian Road, which opens in the spring of 2021, concerns the fall from grace of Campbell Flynn, a 52-year-old quasi-celebrity smoothie: public intellectual, bestselling art historian, well-heeled man about town, “a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit”. When first we meet him, Campbell, who grew up working class in Scotland (the clue’s in the title), is cosily nuzzled in the bosom of the haute bourgeoisie. He lives in a smart house in Islington with his posh therapist wife. His sister is a Labour MP. Her sister is the Duchess of Kendal. They have two kids: a former model, and a gormless superstar DJ. (“This dhal is insane”. Etc.) Campbell teaches a course on “Culture and the Self” at UCL. Well of course he does.
But something is up with Campbell. He’s disorientated. Dizzy. He’s suffering from “spatial problems” and “a lack of solidity”. Some sort of “dislodgement” has occurred. His face, we are told, “is temporary”.
Campbell is unmoored. He has become “a traitor to the class of his youth and a freak to his own moral understanding”. The art historian is forever pictured gazing at something — a painting, a mirror, the view from a window, his phone. He sees things beautifully, we are told, “but only the things he wanted to see”.
Caledonian Road, to borrow a description of a Campbell Flynn podcast, is a “deep dive into the era’s shallows”, a reckoning with the “nonsense of now”.
It’s a Victorian-style state-of-the-nation novel of the kind that nobody attempts any more. A comedy of manners that is also a grenade-lobbing assault on the hypocrisy, entitlement and inequity of modern Britain. And a gleeful satire of the liberal pieties we hope will absolve us of our blithe acceptance of the status quo, while those less fortunate press their noses to our windows.
We’re all complicit, some more than others. Campbell is the epitome of the “garden-square hypocrite”. He thinks that because he writes stern pieces in snooty magazines calling out
corruption and greed, and delivers supposedly subversive lectures at famous museums on the ethical failures of society (“this museum should be in a museum”) that he himself escapes censure. He thinks all this will save him.
Dickens, the greatest of social novelists, is the default precedent for any writer attempting a penthouse-to-pavement portrait of contemporary London. Doubtless his name will be invoked in reviews when the time comes. Fair enough. But I was reminded, too, of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Caledonian Road does for London in the 2020s what Wolfe did for New York in the 1980s. It takes society by four corners like a tablecloth, to borrow another line from the book, and tosses it in the air.
Andrew’s novel is a blast, then. It merrily skewers the media, academia, the art world, fashion, showbiz, politics, the rapaciousness and venality of the one per cent, and the complacency of the virtue-signalling bien pensant.
Campbell Flynn’s acquaintances include a Lebedevian Russian kleptocrat’s son and his father’s Mandelsonian advisor. An unspeakable rag-trade robber baron and his snobbish newspaper-columnist wife. A vile aristocrat (“Hitler overdid it but he had ideas we can jolly well learn from”) and his woo-woo chatelaine, with her mindless chatter about “a new humanity” and “soul definition”. If we are who we know, as Campbell is assured we are, then he really is in deep shit. He has “cloistered himself with badness”.
But it’s not all negronis at 5 Hertford Street. Caledonian Road takes us into newsrooms and country piles and the corridors of power, but also onto council estates, into sweatshops and grow houses. We meet oligarchs and peers of the realm, but also drug dealers and people traffickers, illegal migrants and the lorry drivers who transport them, drill rappers and computer hackers. And also Milo Mangasha, Campbell’s most brilliant student, a young man who inhabits a very different London from Campbell’s comfortable eyrie, even if they share a postcode. Milo, more than anyone, has Campbell’s number. This unlikely pair quickly become locked in a dangerous dance.
Our extract, “Too big for acting”, beginning on page 88, concerns the immediate fallout from a book Campbell has recently published, a cynical self-help title (is there another kind?) called, unimprovably, Why Men Weep in Their Cars. Coward that he is, Campbell has been unwilling to put his name to this nonsense, so has asked an actor, Jake Hart-Davies — a man “fatally ill with the need to be thought special” — to play the part of the author. It’s the actor’s name on the cover, the actor who has been sent out to promote the title to the world. Our extract comes in with Hart-Davies, on location for a costume drama, beginning, dimly, to understand the consequences of his actions…
We’ll be running more extracts from Caledonian Road on our website in the coming weeks.
Andrew’s is by no means the only piece of great writing in this issue. We have a terrific memoir from Ronan Bennett, creator of another essential document of London life. Top Boy, which ran for five seasons, first on Channel 4, then on Netflix, was a gripping, disturbing and ultimately epic portrait of hard-knock lives on a Hackney council estate. I’ve written before about my admiration for Top Boy, and it’s thrilling to have its author contributing to Esquire.
In “The death and life of Top Boy”, Ronan reflects on the struggles of getting such challenging material onto our screens. And on the lessons he’s learnt in his long and distinguished career as a writer. Even if you haven’t watched Top Boy, I urge you to read it. (And also: watch Top Boy.)
Don’t stop there. Our cover story celebrates the 30th anniversary of the release of Definitely Maybe, the debut album from Oasis. It looks back on the year the Gallaghers and their associates arrived into: 1994, a turning point not only for music and culture, argues its author Jon Savage, but for Britain. Jon saw Oasis play live four times that year. I can’t think of anyone better to return us to that pivotal and electrifying moment in British pop.
Jon, like Andrew a veteran Esquire contributor, is Britain’s most important writer on pop music, pop art and pop culture, and the business of being young. He’s the author of a series of thrilling, critically acclaimed histories, including England’s Dreaming, the definitive history of punk; Teenage, about the birth of youth culture; and 1966, about that incendiary year. If Caledonian
Road is the novel smart people will be reading by the pool this summer, I’m predicting its nonfiction equivalent will be The Secret Public, Jon’s magnum opus on the astonishing influence of LGBTQ culture on mainstream pop, from “Tutti Frutti” to “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. It’s out in June. We offer you “Poptimism”, his Oasis piece, to whet your appetite.
There’s more: Miranda Collinge’s wry and touching memoir of a recent train journey around Europe, in the company of her father. Tom Nicholson’s investigation of that tarnished institution of British culture, the pub: is it doomed and, if so, does it matter? Plus Finlay Renwick’s celebration of Britain’s thriving independent workwear designers. And everything else you might rightly expect from Esquire: watches, cars, clothes, all the status symbols a potential Campbell Flynn or a wannabe Top Boy could desire.
Leave it to Will Self, among our nation’s most dazzling writers of fiction and non-, to tie the whole thing up with fancy ribbons with “Feeling slightly ruff”, his story about Le Mercure Galant, the first-ever style magazine.
Were Le Mercure still publishing today, it would regularly display, as we do at Esquire, the work of the British fashion designer Kim Jones, whose fifth anniversary as artistic director of Dior Men’s we mark this issue. In addition to his adventures in fashion, Jones, arguably the most influential menswear designer of our time, maintains the most extraordinary private library I’ve ever browsed, its shelves filled with lovingly preserved first editions of Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac and many more, as well as walls covered with important art: Bacon, Freud, et al. Kim knows, as all Esquire readers do, that an appreciation of literature and a sensitivity to art go hand in cashmere glove with a sense of style.
Something Kim said to me when I saw him recently struck a chord. He said that every brand needs a refresh every few years. It’s five years since we relaunched Esquire with a new size, look, and new sections, and it feels like time for a makeover. We’ve gone for a subtle tweak, initially, a touch-up rather than the full facelift. Regular readers will notice we’ve started with the cover, and the reintroduction of proper coverlines for the first time since 2018. (Radical, no?) More improvements to come as we go along.
Last word goes to Jeremy King, the restaurateur non pareil, who is a paragon of male elegance, as you can see in Chris Floyd’s portrait of him on page 92. Jeremy is also a cultivated man. I sat down with him in November to talk about the latest chapter in a storied life and career, as he prepares to open three new London restaurants this year, beginning with the imminent launch of Arlington, in St James’s, in what was once Le Caprice: the site of his first triumph, in the 1980s. During our conversation Jeremy quoted Nubar Gulbenkian and AA Gill — as well as André Gide and Lampedusa. He looked as dapper as ever while doing so, but he knows, and you know and I know, and even the gentilshommes at the Mercure Galant knew, that real style is not simply about being well dressed, or even well read. It’s about both of those, and something else you can’t quite put your finger on.
Maybe Jeremy gets somewhere close in his description of great design, as something that “should never shout for attention but should withstand scrutiny”.
I hope this issue gets somewhere close to fitting that bill.
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