A Vision of England Today, Dark and Rotten
10 min read
You can tell when an American novelist is going to use their book to say something about the nation. The hero of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March lets us know on page one that he’s “an American, Chicago born.” The same can be said of postcolonial novelists. Think of Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, announcing at the story’s start that “at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.” The authors of Great American Novels and other national counterparts tend to concentrate on one character who serves as a stand-in for greater national themes and experiences—think of the narrator-protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, or V. S. Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas and Alexis Wright’s Cause Man Steel.
By comparison, British writers take a more panoramic approach to writing fiction with national stakes. Since at least the early 1980s, novels such as Martin Amis’s Money and London Fields,Ian McEwan’s Saturday,Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency,John Lanchester’s Capital,Jonathan Coe’s Middle England,Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and now Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road have been read and received in public life as a genre now called the “state-of-the-nation novel.” Rather than focus attention on a single, symbolically freighted protagonist, British state-of-the-nation novels feature large casts of diverse characters connected to one another through intricate plotting and unlikely coincidences that occasion moral soundings and scourings. As they come together, the individual stories of these arrayed characters afford an extended occasion for a chronicling cum assessment of the country’s collective life. The treatment is reliably severe, often by way of cold, hard satire, if at times also a source of affecting emotion.
In other words, British state-of-the-nation novels are written in the long shadow of Charles Dickens, but one never says so outright. That would be too obvious and predictable, and also would raise the question of whether British novelists with interests in interrogating the soul of their nation may still be drafting off the method and model of a legendary forebear more than 150 years dead.
Caledonian Road,O’Hagan’s seventh work of fiction, seems fine with that prospect. The book is darkly and often brilliantly alive to the current state of Great Britain, with its infirm King and disarrayed royal family; its roiled national politics, marked most recently by the decisive election of a magisterially bland new Labour prime minister, who is succeeding a 14-year run of arrogant, clownish, incompetent, and finally slight Conservative predecessors; and its general malaise about the post-Brexit economy as well as the state of the health-care system, schools, and social cohesion.
Compensated for with a bluff national pride, contemporary Britain is alsofull of worry about its slipping prominence in the world and, at the same time, its vulnerability to the malign interests of Russian oligarchs and the desperate hopes of undocumented migrants. Characters from both groups figure importantly in Caledonian Road as part of a cast of 60-odd people, including dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, truck drivers and teenage rappers, environmental activists and computer hackers, art dealers, actors, newspaper columnists, members of Parliament, political and legal fixers, publishing people, multigenerational immigrant families, and angry old Englishmen and Englishwomen.
The novel’s main character, Campbell Flynn, is “tall and sharp at fifty-two,” a “tinderbox in a Savile Row suit.” He’s very pleased with things as of May 2021, as British life begins to emerge uncertainly if jauntily from the coronavirus pandemic, like a wealthy old woman with bad knees and a couple of G&Ts in her. Flynn enjoys a plummy position as an in-demand commentator who “uses his learning to question everything from Adam Smith to vampire novels,” following the critical andcommercial success of his accessible yet intelligent biography of Vermeer. He’s become a regular at ideas festivals and thought-leader summits, he podcasts for the BBC, he’s just published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic about the phenomenon of liberal contrition, and he’s ignoring an invitation to write a column for Harper’s.
He has also finished a new book about the suppressed crisis of male mental health, Why Men Weep in Their Cars, which he considers very important and also a surefire moneymaker. But, uncomfortable with the idea of being associated with a book of questionable intellectual heft, he doesn’t want to be identified as the author. So Flynn publishes it anonymously and hires a handsome young actor to play the author, which backfires when the actor decides to draw on his regressive, laddish intellectualism to bring the book’s arguments to life. People in Flynn’s gossipyelite media and business circles soonbegin to discover his true relationship to the book, which threatens both his hopes for lucre and his intellectual bona fides.
This is distressing. Perpetually living above his means, he needs the money in order to keep his lifestyle going until his aristocratic mother-in-law finally dies and bequeaths her estate (no spoiler alert needed for what happens there), and he’s just been asked to deliver a prestigious lecture at the British Museum. Meanwhile, his wife is a stylish and gracious psychiatrist whose sister married a duke; his children are a cerebral lesbian fashion model and a hyperkinetic globe-trotting DJ. His closest friends and members of his extended family occupy prominent positions in British society. And he’s especially grateful for all of this given his pinched Glaswegian upbringing and the fatalistically modest lives of his late parents. “That was the situation” for Flynn, O’Hagan writes, as he’s about to be driven through London to a fashion house to consult on names for a new perfume. “That, and the fact that he’d stopped paying his taxes.”
O’Hagan deftly deploys Flynn as a variously knowing, unwitting, and selectively ignorant nexus for contemporary Britain’s many moving parts and players. Flynn’s best friend, William Byre, is a scandal-ridden, patrician clothing mogul who laments about his social-justice-warrior son—who “wants to give all my money away to wind farms and transgenders”—and whose wife is an arch conservative columnist at a progressive news site. Beyond his domestic difficulties and his increasingly public problems with sweatshop sourcing and #MeToo allegations, Byre is in deep debt to Aleksandr Bykov, a Shakespeare-quoting, iron-fisted Russian billionaire who enjoys life in “London, the best of all laundering-places.” What makes it the best? The country’s family-run and public charities, its elite universities, research institutes, galleries, and cultural organizations, need a lot of money to keep things going properly. This is granted to them by legitimacy-seeking foreign oligarchs, who—the novel makes explicit, in a pointed political barb—operate confidently within legal rights provided by successive conservative governments. In parallel, these same aging, venerable institutions are desperate for relevance and public attention, which is conferred upon them by intellectuals like Flynn.
That the nation’s cultural institutions depend on swaggering oligarchs and intellectuals is a connection that Flynn’s prize student, Milo Mangasha, is quick to see as he gets to know his swish professor and surfaces Flynn’s unacknowledged connections to London’s grimier elites. Milo is a savvy, hardscrabble Ethiopian Irish computer-science grad student loyal to a crew of rough friends. He inherited a radical egalitarianism from his late mother and wants to change the world by hacking it, which becomes possible after Flynn hires Milo as a researcher for his British Museum talk. As part of the gig, Milo agrees to teach an enthralled Flynn about bitcoin and the dark web. Milo visits him at his well-appointed home off a very different stretch of the Caledonian Road from the place Milo shares with his cab-driving widower dad. Before leaving, he steals Flynn’s passport, on a hunch. Flynn is about to fly to Iceland for a nightclub birthday party organized by his son; he makes a quick call to a well-placed friend and acquires a replacement passport with ease, confirming Milo’s sense that even if Flynn isn’t an oligarch, and despite his excited, proud plan to assail the British Museum in his talk at the British Museum, he profoundly benefits from the injustices of Britain. Even so, as Milo puts it, “he thinks he’s one of the good guys.”
This is among O’Hagan’s more searching and searing themes: the need of Britain’s intelligentsia and native-born elites to consider themselves stewards of a great tradition of national life, even while it’s ever more propped up by outsiders whose very presence and methods erode the vaunted British value of fair play. This dependence is evident in one of the novel’s more tightly wound storylines, involving the undocumented sweatshop workers making clothes for Byre’s business. Byre needs to turn a major profit in order to avoid Bykov’s possibly life-threatening demands to be paid back. Meanwhile, Bykov is the one trafficking these workers into the country. This is just part of Bykov’s enterprise, both shining and underground, which also funds medical research and floats the art market. He’s contracted the human trafficking out to a man named Bozydar, whose mother, upset about her son’s work, declares, “‘We are good people … It pains me to think otherwise.”
This is a great move on O’Hagan’s part, to shift attention from the perpetually opining Flynn and assign an incisive claim to an aging, lower-class, devout-Catholic Polish immigrant about why people like Flynn (and herself) ignore their personal benefit from the injustice and rot of contemporary Britain. They are convinced that they are good people. How they work and live contradicts this. So they find ways to avoid the contradiction.
Indeed, O’Hagan never lets Flynn off easy, even if this means he’s soft on myopic and righteous Milo, whose far-reaching hackery brings down bad actors and reroutes dirty money to support idealistic causes, such as the founding of a dubious-sounding people’s collective on a remote northern island. After Flynn delivers his blistering intellectual attack on the arrogance of the British Museum for not facing up to its imperialist roots, he blissfully walks out of the event he’s headlining. “Stepping into Great Russell Street, he felt a rush of clear air with the smell of roasting chestnuts, and he gave £50 to a homeless man, feeling in that second that he understood and was at one with all the exploited people of the metropolis.” He enjoys this inflated feeling of class-transcending solidarity as long as he ignores one problem: Mrs. Voyles, the miserable old lady renting his basement flat.
Enter Dickens.
Caledonian Road is a superb state-of-the-nation novel, the finest in many years, but what finally matters is its efficacious literary genealogy. Predating and transcending classifications of what a nationally minded book is and isn’t, novels such as Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend established what big-canvas, ambitious works of contemporary fiction involve: balancing humor with moral criticism, innocence with connivance, secrets with exposures, while also creating unexpected, story-changing connections between disparate characters high and low, rich and poor, young and old, native and newcomer.
Dickens invented the very kind of book that O’Hagan has written. Caledonian Road features all of the aforementioned elements and also, more plainly moving along classic Dickensian lines, a chapter-long murder trial at the Old Bailey involving a poor young Black man who never had a chance, and a side story about a simpleminded, pretty young woman, used and abused by a powerful man, who’s eventually found dead by a crusading journalist. Several characters die across the novel’s 600-plus pages, but because, like Dickens before him, O’Hagan makes you root for them and in some cases against them, you want to discover all of this directly, including what happens with decrepit, viper-tongued old Mrs. Voyles (even the name!). She ruins Flynn’s day whenever she has the chance to excoriate him for enjoying the high life while she suffers in the shabby flat directly beneath him. Flynn wants to do right by Mrs. Voyles, sincerely and responsibly, like a good home-owning urban elite, but she won’t give him the pleasure of it, to his increasing frustration, which turns to rage when he has had enough and leaves his lovely house one night, going “into the Caledonian Road and the coming dark.”
This darkness has arrived and is all-pervading in O’Hagan’s convincing vision of contemporary Britain. It covers the powerful and unknown alike. All of them seek advantage and opportunity in a shadowland that paradoxically sustains and corrupts the majestic idea of Britain. Venerable and vital, sophisticated and stalwart, dignified and redoubtable, the nation is genuinely appealing not in spite of but because of the fact that it’s become so appallingly easy to manipulate for your own purposes, whether you’re born in it, lecturing about it, buying into it, buying it, or risking your life in a packed, fetid shipping container just to enter it.
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