You owe your readers a whole lot if you’re going to ask them to read a 700-page book,” says Scottish novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan on a February afternoon in the invitingly Spartan lounge of Manhattan’s Freehand Hotel, as people chat on couches and 23rd Street bustles outside. “What you owe them is intimacy, entertainment, and—most of all in a book like this—a sort of backstage pass, an insight, a membership to the secret places of the city.”
Caledonian Road (Norton, June), O’Hagan’s swift, sweeping, and searing seventh novel, offers just that: an invitation to plumb the secret enclaves of the London of 2021. Inspired by Tom Wolfe and Upton Sinclair, O’Hagan thought of himself as a sort of “reader’s representative” as he explored a host of Londons during the 10 years it took to write Caledonian Road: the worlds of street gangs, high-end fashion, broke-ass journalists, and august men’s clubs patronized by the flintiest upper-class businessmen; the underground of hackers and nightclubs where Russian oligarchs would blow £50,000 in an evening; a polo match where the queen was present.
“It was just an incredible experience as a writer,” he says, still trim and ebullient in his mid-50s. “I was with migrants coming from Vietnam. I spent weeks at the Old Bailey following cases. I was in that circle around Windsor Castle and Prince Andrew. And I saw that there’s a common factor in all of this: Caledonian Road, one road in London that flowed through each of those stories. And I thought, bang, I can do this. I can bring it all together.”
O’Hagan laughs: “But it was backbreaking.”
Still, the effort paid off, at least according to this spring’s reviews overseas. The Times Literary Supplement called the book “wildly readable, brimming with energy and filled with enjoyable contemporary detail.” The Guardian hailed it as “a frontline dispatch from the trenches of culture wars and a much-needed, vividly enjoyable broadside to them.”
John Glusman, vice president and executive editor at Norton, O’Hagan’s U.S. publisher, relishes the novel’s “breadth and depth but also its joy as it explores the best and worst of us through this diverse cast,” he says. “There’s such delight in the storytelling that it doesn’t feel like a long book. Andy’s not malicious, and he writes with compassion, but that doesn’t mean he can’t skewer the ridiculousness of human nature.”
Born and raised in hardscrabble Glasgow, O’Hagan has written seven novels, mostly intimate examinations of contemporary U.K. lives, and heaps of reportage for the London Review of Books, where he was a staffer in the early 1990s, and the New York Review of Books. As a journalist, he’s seen the disruptions of the digital era up close, ghostwriting for Julian Assange and then reporting on that experience, and searching for the truth about the creation of Bitcoin.
He’s a fast talker, with a light touch even when lancing pomposity or expressing moral outrage, and he relishes community in his stretch of London, which for him centers on Sam’s Café, the Primrose Hill “greasy spoon without the grease” that O’Hagan runs with his friend, actor and producer Sam Frears.
At the heart of Caledonian Road is the kind of surprising, class-and-culture-crossing relationship that often powers what the British call “state-of-the-nation” novels. Campbell Flynn, an art historian and preening public intellectual, can’t quite face his gut feeling that something inside him and his society has gone rotten. He strikes up a relationship with graduate student and expert hacker Milo Mangasha, the social justice–minded son of an Ethiopian-born community activist.
Between sparkling speeches about Vermeer (“the patron saint of individual merit”), Flynn enlists a skeptical Milo as a sort of tour guide into the inequities of contemporary Britain. “The world’s changing, Professor Flynn,” Milo tells him. “It’s due a complete reset. Meanwhile, you’ll spend your life worrying about what a girl in a Vermeer painting sees in a letter she’s holding.”
That hooks the celebrity professor, and Milo—who considers Flynn the mark in a project he’s cooking up—pushes Flynn toward urgent insights about society’s rottenness that Flynn plans to incorporate into a major lecture to be delivered at the British Museum. Milo also nudges him toward cryptocurrencies, the dark web, and a reckoning.
A natty dresser whose home has been featured in House & Garden magazine, O’Hagan shares some background with Flynn. Both grew up working class in Glasgow. Both have been toasted—and occasionally harangued—for their work not always honoring orthodoxies. Both worry about a crisis of male identity in the 21st century, with Flynn pseudonymously publishing a self-help bestseller titled Why Men Weep in Their Cars, and O’Hagan finding himself moved by thousands of messages he’s received from men who felt a connection to his 2020 novel Mayflies, a portrait of a lifelong friendship forged in the rock music of 1980s Manchester. “Many of them say in their opening sentences, ‘I’ve never read a book in my life before,’ ” he notes with a touch of awe.
Both author and character also feel deep resonance in Wordsworth’s phrase “too deep for tears,” which turns up in Caledonian Road as a Flynn family saying and in O’Hagan’s recent New York Review of Books essay on the American political fabulist George Santos.
O’Hagan accepts a question about this echo with such warmth that it’s easy to understand how he navigates an array of social milieus. “I think the men in crisis that I’ve been writing about, including Campbell, do have problems that are too deep for tears,” he says. “The problems are not so obvious and available that they could just cry about them and get over it. They exist at a level of themselves that they can’t even reach.”
Perhaps the key difference between author and creation is Flynn’s zeal to avoid, in public or in his heart, being implicated in the systems that have rewarded him but neglected so many others. “I don’t have an argument about the state of white males, middle-aged men, or liberal thinking in general, but in the specifics of this book this man has had it coming for a long time,” O’Hagan says. “You can’t have that degree of racism in your institution and think it’s fine and that you’re still a good liberal. He’s been satisfied, financially, emotionally, intellectually, and artistically. He’s been living on borrowed time, and he complicates it by semi-calling himself out.”
O’Hagan says it’s not only Flynn who needs to face what’s spoiled inside him—it’s Britain itself. “I don’t think people know the extent to which London became laundromat for the money of Russian oligarchs. It was corrupted with the aid, I’m afraid, of the U.K. parliament. London changed physically, and there was an orgy of excess spending and a devaluing in our social fabric. Poor people were getting poorer, and basic rights and services were being eroded, whilst these super rich were buying more yachts, buying more houses, more art.”
Caledonian Road, for all its comedy and bite, lacks the grotesques and over-the-top burlesques of many earlier all-of-society novels, stretching back to the Victorians. For O’Hagan, the last thing a distorted London and a distorted world need is more distortion.
“There’s a reality deficit in so much of the life that we live now that surely this should be a golden period for the novel,” he says. “It should be the fiction makers that start to reinstate reality, or insist on it, when we’re all faced with a man like Donald Trump or somebody like George Santos. It’s an amazing opportunity to use the skills of fiction and the orderliness of the imagination to try and fight back, and I believe that a novel can do that.”
