Campbell Flynn is an academic, an art historian and would be cultural commentator. Though originally from a less than moneyed background in Glasgow. He has married into a much wealthier family with aristocratic connections, he imagines himself a much more elevated and important person than any of his old money relations do. A lot of folk think him a bit of a lightweight impostor. He's written one successful book about Vermeer, but holds a vision of himself as less tradition bound and capable of being more cutting edge than that.
He writes a book Why Men Weep In Their Cars a polemic on the state of modern masculinity. It feels too left field and exposing for him. So he decides with his publisher to pay an actor Jake Harte Davis to publicly pretend to be its author. However, once published, Harte Davis goes off script and starts expressing much more ruinous and controversial views that cause the publisher to pull the book off sale. On top of this Campbell begins collaborating with a student Milo on writing a lecture, who unbeknownst to him is a computer hacker who is simply using him to gain access to further potentially damaging information about William Byre and his nefarious circle of connections.
Byre is an old college friend from Cambridge, who has since then become phenomenally wealthy. A charismatic witty bruiser of a businessman, who has got where he has purely by not being too concerned about the ethics or probity of how his wealth has been acquired. But all of that is now rapidly catching up with Byre, and accusations of fraud, employing illegal immigrant work forces and now a scandal about the sexual abuse of his mistress. Campbell is heavily in debt, mostly in money borrowed from Byre, so his own safely privileged world now looks a lot more unstable. Its no longer a question of if, but when this might all collapse. Will Campbell, by association alone be drawn into Byre's ignominy?
Now these are only a fraction of a vast microcosm of characters woven into this story. There are Countesses, Dukes, Russian oligarchs. dodgy drug dealers, a devious uncooperative tenant of Campbell's, wealthy environmental campaigners, investigative journalists, controversial shock jock columists, all of whom stomp their very muddy feet in Campbell's world or family. Its often very funny about the mutual disdain held between old and new money, new and old tech, and the sense that one thinks the other morally inferior. In actuality they are all implicated in a world that is fundamentally poisoned by its own prejudices and rank hypocrisy. And though Campbell might like to believe he can be above all that, he isn't.
Caledonian Road can quite justifiably make a claim to be a current state of the nation novel. Its a London centric world view of how the elites pat themselves on the back. And if there is trouble deny it all, keep your head down for a while, then regroup for the humbled and redeemed come back. So far all so familiar. O'Hagan's previous book Mayflies was a huge success, rightfully much lauded. Its focus, however, was much more tightly drawn than Caledonian Road. Caledonian Road, if it suffers from anything its through the sprawling nature of its web of characters that criss-cross fertilise and implicate still more. That the book devotes two preliminary pages to briefly list all the characters, who they are and who they are related to, tells you the publishers thought we might need some help keeping up, and we do.
The stench of emerging scandal permeates every page, it doesn't so much erupt, but slowly seeps increasingly noxious fumes to the surface. The narrative, hence. can feel a little lacking in foreshadowing exactly where its taking you, the necessary element of dramatic thrust sometimes appearing absent. It can give the impression at times of being overly polite and gentle in resisting really skewering its characters. Everyone portrayed here is to one extent or another putting on an acceptable front. The only ones who don't give a damn are the aristocrats, who say exactly what they mean out loud, and be damned. Its the fate of state of the nation novels in that they never age that well. They also are written these days so the middle class literati can mourn their revolutionary sentiments through them, and then quickly move on before the desire 'to actually do something' overwhelms them. The age of Dickens where a sharply pointed novel could launch a reform movement is long gone. These days we haven't gotta clue what to do.
When on form O'Hagan writes with his usual beautifully eloquent sense for the telling detail and his feeling for the satirical in situations can be pin point accurate. I enjoyed reading Caledonian Road a lot, even though it never quite compelling captured the whole of my attention.
CARROT REVIEW 5/8
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