Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan review – state-of-the-nation burlesque | Fiction

The metropolis itself is the star of all nice London novels, and performs no matter function is required by the story or the instances. It was a semi-sentient organism in Dickens’s Bleak Home, wrapped in fog and thick with mud. It was rancorous and gone to seed in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Sq.; gauche and adventurous in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Rookies and Zadie Smith’s White Enamel. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids solid it as a metropolis of the blind, prowled by carnivorous strolling vegetation. That most likely stays fictional London’s lowest ebb. However at instances, for darkish stretches, Andrew O’Hagan’s seventh novel runs it shut.

That is under no circumstances to counsel that Caledonian Highway is a drag. Fairly the other: it’s an addictively pleasant yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider’s grasp on the nuances of excessive tradition. However this bustling, boisterous burlesque has the bitter undertow of despair. The London that emerges from its 600-odd pages resembles an unlimited, rotting carcass picked over by carrion. The individuals stay off it, not in it, and appear to be intent on stripping the place to the bone.

The novel understands all too properly that this metropolis is a bubble; that its reckoning is within the submit

Our tour information of kinds is 52-year-old Campbell Flynn, a star author and educational who owns a home in Islington’s Thornhill Sq., maintains a second dwelling out in Suffolk and not too long ago accomplished a money-spinning self-help ebook known as Why Males Weep in Their Automobiles. Life is nice, he’s dwelling the dream, which is one other method of claiming that he’s careering in direction of catastrophe, folded in with an ensemble solid of noblemen and human traffickers, display screen actors and newspaper columnists. When O’Hagan isn’t arranging walk-on cameos for true-life personalities (Baz Luhrmann, Grayson Perry), he whips up such coy caricatures as Yuri Bykov, the preening playboy son of a Russian oligarch. That is rollicking fiction lifted from on-the-ground truth, the novel rekitted as a journalistic first draft of historical past. Yuri, it ought to be famous, is emphatically not Evgeny Lebedev. However they could as soon as have shared the identical infinity pool.

As for Campbell, he’s solely tangentially associated to the creator himself, even when each are the sons of Glaswegian joiners, raised on council estates and now reinvented as shiny middle-aged males of letters. Campbell, for his half, is sensible sufficient to see 2020s London for what it’s: a den of thieves and chancers, hobbled by Brexit and bloated by Russian money. However he’s compromised and conflicted, the traditional working-class bind. He’s seduced by the cash, the standing and glamour. His way of life’s been bankrolled by a rackety tycoon, William Byre. In the meantime, within the basement, lurks his offended sitting tenant Mrs Voyles. When Campbell hits all-time low, Mrs Voyles lies in wait with her horror tales of rat infestations, damaged gates and dangerous plumbing. In a curious roundabout style, it nearly seems like coming dwelling.

Bounding from the penthouse to the pavements, administering to a sprawling solid of characters, Caledonian Highway nods most clearly to Dickens (Mrs Voyles is self-consciously positioned as “a Dickensian crone”), though it additionally stirs recollections of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Paolo Sorrentino’s movie The Nice Magnificence. It’s a daring, bullish story of hubris and corruption, a ebook concurrently dazzled and disgusted by the town it depicts. O’Hagan falters barely when he’s operating alongside London’s youth, with their fist bumps and shout-outs and full-on occurring events. Elsewhere, his prose is nimble, energetic and sure-footed. Caledonian Highway is aware of how newspapers and excessive courts and prison gangs function. It is aware of the value in a membership of a magnum of Cristal (£1.5k, for those who’re asking) and two bottles of top-notch Belvedere vodka (£600). Crucially, it understands all too properly that this metropolis is a bubble: that its financial system is unsustainable and that its reckoning is within the submit.

“The entire nation is in deep,” explains Tara Hastings, the younger investigative reporter who’s probing the connections between Campbell, William Byre, Yuri Bykov and the Duke of Kendal. Besides that Tara ought to most likely declare an curiosity as properly, on condition that she was a part of Yuri’s social set again at Oxford. “All of them know one another,” says Campbell. The Russian crooks and the English lords. The flamboyant artwork sellers and the hard-right politicians.

Campbell, God assist him, has managed to crack the category ceiling. However his place is provisional, depending on the patronage of his social betters. In his darkest moments, the person views himself as an impostor, an outsider. He’s “a liquid presence”, we’re instructed, “by no means fairly completed as an individual”. O’Hagan shakes him up and deploys him as a sort of diagnostic barium meal, pouring him down by means of the Islington townhouses and eating places, previous the golf equipment, pubs and delivery containers, all the best way to the basement, because the story performs out as a terrific dying fall.

Caledonian Highway by Andrew O’Hagan is printed by Faber (£20). To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply expenses could apply.