Author Andrew O’Hagan.Christina Jansen/Supplied
Caledonian Road, the seventh work of fiction by Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, began life, at least tangentially, with Julian Assange.
O’Hagan, who had assisted the Wikileaks founder in writing his memoirs, had been commissioned to write an article for the London Review of Books about the controversial whistle-blower. (The article appeared in book form as one third of the 2017 nonfiction volume The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age.) The “long and very close” association O’Hagan developed with Assange more than 10 years ago was psychologically taxing on the author, who plays it down by saying simply, “It was a very weird experience.”
While recovering (O’Hagan’s word), he found himself in the National Gallery in London, where he ended up eavesdropping on an older man lecturing a younger man about the paintings of the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. “The student was questioning every fundamental assumption that the lecturer was making about ownership and value and civilization,” O’Hagan says. “Just watching the conversation between them, and my eyes darting to the Vermeer behind them, gave me the novel.”
O’Hagan means this quite literally. There is a scene in Caledonian Road in which Campbell Flynn, professor of art history and late-middle-aged fading liberal, meets one of his students, a hacker named Milo Mangasha, at the National Gallery, where they engage in an exchange almost identical to the one O’Hagan describes witnessing.
Their conversation forms one of the key early scenes in a magnum opus that took 10 years to write and attempts nothing less than an analysis of post-Brexit Britain in all its fractured messiness. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, matters of class (what O’Hagan calls “the dark backing in the mirror that allows you to see anything at all in British society”) and the associated economic disparities that represent “the dark flowering of all Thatcher’s worst ideas.”
It’s a big book, in every sense of the word. Clocking in at just under 650 pages and featuring 60 characters from all walks of society – including immigrants trafficked across the border, politicians, gangsters and minor royals – Caledonian Road is a sprawling social novel that harks back to the work of Balzac and Dickens while never feeling less than completely contemporary. “I felt very strongly that these times that we’ve been living through, and the London that I’d lived in for three and a half decades, had suddenly become the most interesting place at the most interesting moment of my life,” O’Hagan says. “I wanted to somehow travel inside all those different energies and find my characters there.”
In doing so, O’Hagan was also travelling back in time, to his boyhood in the Scottish town of Ayrshire, where he would haunt the library, checking out big, fat novels he’d lug back to his bedroom to devour. “I felt like my whole mind was being fertilized by these great books by these great authors,” he says. “There’s a little part of that boy, not just as a reader but as a writer, who still lives.”
A childhood fascination with doorstopper novels is one thing; it’s quite another to pull one off as a writer. The endeavour, which included meeting Russian oligarchs and royals and spending untold hours doing research in the Old Bailey courthouse, was the literary equivalent of a punishing marathon. During the time it took to compose the book, O’Hagan took a year-and-a-half long sabbatical to write an entirely different novel: 2020′s Mayflies, which is a relatively svelte 288 pages.
O’Hagan credits the break with giving him fresh eyes on his project and providing him the added confidence needed to see it through to completion. “Writing a big novel like that really is like pushing a massive boulder up a big hill,” he says. “You’re afraid that at any second you’ll misstep and the thing will roll back and crush you to death.”
One danger in this regard is ensuring the reader keeps turning the pages. Ironically, though Caledonian Road is O’Hagan’s longest novel, it is also his most concentrated, a book in which every sentence is calculated to move the narrative forward. There is also nothing in the way of sermonizing about the more freighted political aspects of the story, something that, for the author, would immediately sink the entire vessel. “Novelists that lecture at their readers and editorialize about their characters are no good,” O’Hagan says. “That’s the contract you have with the reader: your job is to suggest two plus two and let them do the addition.”
If Caledonian Road is a throwback to the vast social canvasses that novelists used to paint on, it is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the social novel’s importance, something that O’Hagan says is increasingly getting lost in our modern era. “I worry sometimes that the novel has lost its position as the chief moral device artistically in everyday society, the little bit of art that almost everybody can afford,” he says. “We’re not looking to the novel to pose the big questions the way we have in the past. I believe that could be revived. You just need the novels.”