ANDREW O’HAGAN Caledonian Road. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey

This new novel from the author of Mayflies is set in London, but Glasgow is never far away.

Andrew O’Hagan is again drawing upon his Glaswegian background for Caledonian Road, with characters who are slightly similar and far more sinister than those in his previous bestseller, Mayflies. The people who live in and around Caledonian Road, London, have the same jokey, at times slightly threatening, shared language, as well as the same understanding that one’s childhood home is a place to get away from.

Other characters, who live close by in the posher London squares, also share a language. They talk in the same mostly nuanced way about their money, comfort, security, and choices, but unlike Caledonian Road, London squares are places where, once you’ve arrived, you only leave to go to the country house in Surrey or to Heathrow for a holiday in Iceland.

The protagonist of Caledonian Road is Professor Campbell Flynn. He lives with his almost-too-sane wife Elizabeth in a white many-windowed house on a London square. He is not really a professor, nor is he really from one of the squares of London. But by the time we meet him, all outward signs that might indicate different origins have been smoothly crafted away. Even his choice of scents, esoteric and adventurous, speak of a man so at home with his good fortune, he is confident enough to challenge its hypocrisies. To begin with, ever so gently.

The first inkling that we should worry about Campbell Flynn arrives relatively early on, and despite his flaws we do not stop worrying about him for the next six hundred or so pages. O’Hagan has made Campbell a modern Everyman. Unlike the traditional ordinary, humble everyman, Campbell Flynn mirrors the reality that while some of those blessed with the talent and good fortune to get ahead can be ordinary, few are any longer humble. Western civilised man has lost his humility, and it is this that eats away at Campbell, and possibly O’Hagan. Campbell knows he has lost something in his climb from a lowly rung on the socio-economic ladder to a more salubrious one, but he is not sure, for some time, exactly what that is.

Fear, a now ever-present trait within western society, is evident in the behaviour of most of the major characters, notably those who do not live in the dog-eat-dog world of Caledonian Road. O’Hagan clearly believes if you live somewhere like Caledonian Road you have nothing to fear because you have nothing to lose. The character who most typifies a knowingness that is only a hair’s breadth from fear is Campbell’s daughter, Kenzie, who has always felt ‘a bit endangered’. She wears

… a vintage grey silk jumpsuit under a hot-pink jacket. Sandals in winter. Pink toenails … The heat generated by most of her friends was now too much for her, and she looked for a cooler hand, one day, in hers, or else a life of quiet sufficiency and the bravery to go it alone.

We forgive Kenzie her pink toenails in winter and extravagant life because she humbly feels the frisson of fear that comes with possibly losing the wealth that affords it, and perhaps the unfairness that she has it at all. It is those who have no gratitude for their good fortune, no sense of humility, that we can’t forgive and we patiently wait for their comeuppance. Sometimes O’Hagan rewards us, sometimes not.

In a huge cast of characters – a two-page list is thoughtfully provided – there are very few for whom we have no sympathy. That the one character who deserves none will also clearly slither scot-free from under a multitude of heinous charges illustrates one of the very many points O’Hagan is making. That the one character who we see as a corrupter becomes an almost heroic figure is another lesson to think about. In this rich and rewarding read there are many points being made and, skilfully avoiding the didactic, O’Hagan makes them all with humour and at times poignancy.

Despite being published in 2024, there is a fin de siècle tone to Caledonian Road, as if by capturing the zeitgeist O’Hagan wishes to warn the urban elite that soon all their privileges might disappear. This idea has come to feature among the many rationales for Kamala Harris’s loss in the United States presidential elections, and it reflects well on O’Hagan’s social and political perspicacity. However, O’Hagan – a member one assumes of the urban elite himself – allows his readers to feel that while things change, life will always go on. There are survivors in this book – not only the characters who do not deserve to survive, but also those O’Hagan has given genuine humility and, in what for many is a confusing world, a genuine desire to understand what the hell is going on.

Ultimately we are invited to weep for the generation that has made such a mess of its good fortune. The one final irony is that it is this generation and their children who, in all likelihood, make up many of O’Hagan’s readers. In a sense O’Hagan is making fun of us, our foibles and our good intentions, which will always tempered by our concern to hold onto what we have, no matter how unjustly we have gained it.

Andrew O’Hagan Caledonian Road Faber & Faber 2024 PB 656pp $34.99

Catherine Pardey has reviewed for Rochford Street Review and The Beast.

You can buy Caledonian Road from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Andrew | O'Hagan, Glasgow, London, Mayflies, Scottish authors, social commentary, urban elites