Still, as ever in London, bold literary endeavors attract notice. Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, a doorstopper titled “Caledonian Road,” has been among the best-selling of the season, displayed on the front table of every Waterstones, touted as a perceptive “state of the nation” tome and much praised at dinner parties.
Some British reviewers have compared it to “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe’s brilliant capture of New York in the 1980s. The similarities go only so far. O’Hagan, like Wolfe, started professional life as a journalist, and his novel does employ a sprawling scope, shifting settings and a huge cast of characters hailing from both high society and low. But absent from “Caledonian Road” is anything approaching Wolfe’s carnival barker glee in presenting a vast and wicked urban tapestry.
While O’Hagan’s novel has funny bits, it is fundamentally glum, befitting the time and place of its writing. The author’s pious preoccupations: How far will a middle-aged liberal, who has always considered himself on the right side of history, be prepared to go in the name of self-preservation? How quickly will his principles crumble when under real-world pressure?
Like the author, protagonist Campbell Flynn is a native of working-class Glasgow, Scotland. He’s a celebrity art historian — a job description that only a Brit can pull off. Think Simon Schama, but younger. Flynn has risen to stratospheric social heights thanks to his intellect, his gumption and his alliances, in particular his marriage to Elizabeth, whose mother is a countess and whose brother-in-law is a duke.
When the story commences in May 2021, Flynn’s conscience is pricked when an idealistic student, Milo Mangasha, criticizes him. “I’m betting you’ve never risked anything in your life, never really set out to upset anything,” Milo tells Flynn. Rather than point to the door, the professor invites the young man to join him for drinks at Claridge’s for further discussions. There’s nothing sexual about this penitential relationship, Campbell assures Elizabeth: “I’m fascinated by what he can show me.”
Wife — and reader — struggle to understand. Far more plausible is Flynn’s recklessness with money. He’s not a flush City type, although he loves the trappings of the banker’s life, including Savile Row suits. His income is overstretched in trying to maintain both a large townhouse in Islington (on the posh side of the eponymous Caledonian Road) and a comfortable cottage in bucolic Suffolk. He’s counting on his rich mother-in-law to leave her daughter, and him, a hefty bequest. Meanwhile, he borrows funds from a university buddy, Sir William Byre, an unscrupulous retail tycoon. And to raise still more cash, he decides to write a silly self-help book called “Why Men Weep in Their Cars,” which he publishes under the name of a semi-famous actor friend.
Flynn’s life begins to unravel after Byre is arrested (thanks in part to Milo’s hacking of Flynn’s phone), his mother-in-law dies and leaves the couple only token gifts, and the actor positions the self-help book as a defense of misogyny. But it is Flynn’s antagonism toward the “sitting tenant” residing in the basement of his Islington manse that proves his undoing. Local government guarantees the right of the crazy and resentful Mrs. Voyles to live in his home. When she demands ever-larger sums of money as the price of her agreeing to leave, Flynn responds in a way that belies all of his allegedly compassionate social views.
O’Hagan constructs a number of other storylines, illuminating matters such as the influence of dirty Russian money in London and the exploitation of migrant labor in Britain, but he’s best on the upper crust. And because this book — unlike his previous novel, the intimate “Mayflies,” about a teenage friendship — is intended as social criticism, it somewhat falls down as fiction. Snappy dialogue can’t rescue a number of characters from sounding like types. Too many scenes resemble highfalutin set pieces rather than ringing painfully true. And yet, the chapter in which Flynn and his wife are forced to fly to Reykjavik to celebrate his birthday because their obnoxious adult son insists that Iceland is the place to eat curry these days, is a satirical tour-de-force. Campbell reflects: “This is what it comes to, parenting. You swab their knees and wipe their arses and pay for everything and one day they get to treat you like you’re simply another pest in their busy lives.”
The lavish cultural set-dressing throughout “Caledonian Road” — countless references to schools, restaurants, neighborhoods, vacation spots, opera festivals, etc. — gives the text admirable specificity, but is rather lost on the non-native. And Campbell, as a peevish liberal losing his way morally, all the while protesting he really doesn’t mean to, is an intensely British character.
You may have to be here, in London, to fully appreciate O’Hagan’s point. There’s something not quite right with Campbell Flynn, just as millions of Britons suspect there’s something not quite right about today’s U.K.
Clare McHugh is the author most recently of “The Romanov Brides.”
W.W. Norton. 624 pp. $32.50
