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Dazzled and Disgusted: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

(Faber, 2024)

Andrew Murray Scott

While Andrew O’Hagan’s 1999 novel Our Fathers tackled toxic masculinity, alcoholism and the death of socialism within Scottish Labour, Caledonian Road is a literary exposé of the worst excesses of laundromat London at the tail-end of the covid pandemic with Russian oligarchs funding the Brexit campaign among other kinds of nefarious activity. In 2017 when O’Hagan announced at the EIBF he had become a supporter of independence he was working on this book and Scotland, notions of Scottishness and independence are embedded in it, even the title is a glorious piece of irony, for Caledonian Road in Islington was named after the Royal Caledonian Asylum built in 1828 for the children of poor exiled Scots.

His protagonists, celebrity art historian / media pundit Professor Campbell Flynn and sister Moira, a left-wing Labour MP and QC, are not poor exiles although their background is the Glasgow high-rise milieu of Our Fathers. The novel starts with self-satisfied Flynn showing off how successful and well-connected he is, his wife’s mother is a Countess, his sister-in-law a Duchess… he knows the etiquette, feels morally superior, but soon the mask begins to slip and Flynn is sinking into an abyss of nepotism, exploitation, hypocrisy, xenophobia and the Dark Net.

A cast list of sixty includes illegal immigrants, people-smuggling gangs, sweat shops and the gangstas of the Cally Active from a nearby council estate. The monsters are hilarious; acid-tongued columnist Lady Antonia Byres who hates Scottish nationalists (and everybody else) and the vengeful sitting tenant in the Flynn’s garden flat, Mrs Voyles, a Dickensian crone.  Political corruption is facilitated by two bookending ‘fixers’, Lord ‘Three Suppers’ Scullion of Wrayton (Lab) and Lord Haxby of Howden (Con) who can sort any problem the elite may have, at a price. Scots include beautiful, addicted Vicky Gowans, victim of an abusive relationship with disgraced tycoon Sir William Byres, Flynn’s obnoxious son Angus, a hyper-trendy international DJ and his daughter Kenzie a former model.

Dazzled and disgusted by metropolitan life Flynn is haunted by something unresolved in his Glasgow upbringing and feels like an imposter, queasy about his connections with Byres, his brother-in-law the Duke of Kendal (who has a Scottish estate and title) and Russian oligarchs Aleksandr and Yuri Bykov. Scottish Independence gets an approving mention in the passing. ‘Nationalism and intolerance grow together,’ is suggested in a discussion and countered by illegal immigrant Jakub: ‘Not everywhere…. (not) Scotland,’ he says (or) the ‘Republic of Ireland.’

And with the bubble about to burst, a very Scottish escape route appears when Flynn’s brilliant student Milo, a deeply ambivalent character being both a computer science graduate and involved with the gangstas, hacks accounts of the wealthy to enable the purchase of a remote island community called Eilean Ròin at ‘the top of the world’ (a parody of Tir Nan Og) which ‘they will have to invent.’ Milo thus heads north into ‘natural light’ with his father and girlfriend and sends Flynn, in his Pentonville Prison cell, a letter from Ullapool. O’Hagan is playfully suggesting we need to escape London corruption and set up on our own!  Full of layers, subtexts and half-hidden ironies, this is a powerful and highly entertaining novel, the literary equivalent of Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row,’ that dazzles and disgusts in equal measure. 

Scots Independent, March 2025

More Stories Appearing…

Since my story ‘We Are An Island’ was published in the journal of Irish and Scottish writing, Causeway / Cabhsair 13:2 in July, I have had three further stories from the (unpublished) collection published in literary magazines. ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’ appears in the Galway Review, Last Refuge in Literally Stories and ‘The Woman Inside’ in Shorts, which is a global online prose magazine edited in Northern Arizona!

Causeway / Cabhsair magazine

My short story ‘We Are An Island’ has been published in Causeway/Cabhsair 13:2, the journal of Irish and Scottish Writing. Issue 13:2 is well up to the usual high standard with 32 contributors including Liam Boyle, Kevin Cahill, Gavan Duffy and Nuala O’Farrell and our own Jennifer Morag Henderson, Judith Taylor, Martin Raymond among very many other interesting contributions. My story is a positive, optimistic account of an English couple’s migration to a Hebridean island and the new life they make there: It dramatises the dictum that we are all migrants and what really counts is not where we came from but the empathy and commitment we show in your new community. Copies of the magazine can be ordered online by googling the title or Aberdeen University Press, price £6. It’s a very valuable publication and deserves support of readers.

“A unionist plot and shady British spooks make for powerful thriller”

Powerful thriller… another outing for the down-at-heel but dogged and honourable Morton

Scott has got these conspiratorial thrillers off to a fine art, balancing political intrigue, suspense and paranoia with good pacing and solid character work, whether he’s putting his hapless hero in the path of a beating, a dressing-down or an awkward date.

8th July

By Alastair Mabbott

SUSPECT LOYALTIES

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Suspect-Loyalties-Willie-Morton-Investigations-ebook/dp/B0CW1L743X
Andrew Scott
(Twa Corbies, £9.99)

In the course of his four previous outings, Andrew Scott’s Edinburgh-based journalist Willie Morton has developed quite a nose for sniffing out covert plots by MI5 spooks, politicians and civil servants to subvert the democratic process and keep Scottish affairs under Westminster control – usually attracting a great deal of trouble, and the occasional brush with death, for his efforts.

This latest takes place in 2009, following on from the events of Deadly Secrecy. Morton has written a book about his investigation into the death of anti-nuclear activist Angus McBain, only to see sales dry up after the first couple of months. At 37, Morton is divorced, living in a flat he can no longer afford, driving around in an old Volkswagen Beetle and freelancing for the Scottish Standard while chasing “that big career-defining story [that] still eluded him”.

On a depressing trip to Glasgow to sign some books at a shop that hadn’t even been told he was coming, Morton is approached by a man who wants to share some information with him. He believes that a recent by-election in Glenforgan, Fife, was rigged.

This is all taking place during Gordon Brown’s brief tenure as Prime Minister, and everyone knows that it won’t be long before he will be facing off against David Cameron in a General Election.

In Scotland, power is shifting away from Labour towards the SNP and the momentum of the independence movement is building in the long run-up to the referendum. In this context, the Glenforgan by-election is significant, as it was a surprise win for Labour in a constituency that was expected to be carried by the SNP.

Morton doesn’t believe the by-election was fraudulently won, but he’s always on the lookout for a story, so starts to make enquiries. What he finds is that bin-bags full of election registers have disappeared from the basement of the Glenforgan Sheriff Court and that a shady, elusive character named Raymond Mearns may be the key to understanding what happened to them.

The recently-installed Deputy Returning Officer, Neil Shankwell, has questions to answer – and gets aggressive when Morton asks them.

A conspiracy begins to emerge, which, in best Andrew Scott fashion, oozes its way up the corridors of power to an unaccountable off-the-books department devoted to keeping the United Kingdom together by extinguishing the flames of nationalism. It also seems to share connections with the nascent New Britain Party, led by a man who rejoices in the name of Michael Ramage.

It’s not subtle, but thrillers shouldn’t have to be. Raymond Mearns makes an effective, sneering villain, ashamed of his council house past, irritated by the suggestion that he “sounded Scottish” and surrounding himself with the trappings of success.

Morton’s superficial, materialistic ex-wife, far happier working in London than sweating away in the provinces, is less thoroughly fleshed-out, little more than a cameo. But both are measured and found wanting against the down-at-heel but dogged and honourable Morton and characters like his salt-of-the-earth father, a former soldier whose experiences soured him on British imperialism and who now potters away in his garden and supports independence.

Informed by his former jobs as a journalist and parliamentary media officer, and with a host of fiction and non-fiction books under his belt, Scott has got these conspiratorial thrillers off to a fine art, balancing political intrigue, suspense and paranoia with good pacing and solid character work, whether he’s putting his hapless hero in the path of a beating, a dressing-down or an awkward date.

Seeking Agent…!

My career is a mish-mash of books published, reprinted, remaindered even, gone out of print, from a variety of publishers, mostly small Scottish publishers, few of whom had much promotional spend. Consequently, my career has lurched from book to book, publisher to publisher, to self-publishing to… nothing much. And yet, I’ve had a career, won prizes, well, A prize (that was 23 years ago now!) and eighteen books are out there, some in several editions, paperback, hardback, ebook, even one audiobook. When I started out, I was using a portable typewriter, though I’ve been an earlier adopter of tech, have had a website for around twenty years. Not that it’s done me much good. Anyway, I’m still at it, book after book, though now it’s getting harder to see where I’m going. Which of course starts to impact on my writing, negatively. If only… I had got an agent in those early days instead of sending to publishers and bashing away on my own! Because that would provide many good things, regular feedback for one, support, some order in my career. It’d be great and I remain hopeful. But, a funny thing, I’ve seen the beast that is the publishing world change, or mutate over these years. Now there are publishers that look different to Publishers and some that aren’t really publishers at all. In the same way, there are Agents and agents. I’m trying to contact these (agents and Agents) in the conventional way about my recent work but, hell, why not put an ad on here, I thought. Can’t do any harm. You never know who might see this. Probably nobody but…

Fictional Dundees

Bookweek Scotland Event

Looking forward to talking about my novels and Dundee history; representations of Dundee and environs throughout its history as depicted in fiction by me and other authors. I’ll be chatting to the reading group at Monifieth Library, Angus, on Tuesday 16th November from 2.15. The event is free but ticketed, as part of Scottish Book Trust’s #BookweekScotland programme. @BookWeekScot

Pre-orders for Sovereign Cause

We are now in the final week of pre-orders for the fourth Willie Morton political thriller, Sovereign Cause and it’s already clear more readers have pre-ordered this title than others in the series. Thanks to all who have pre-ordered the paperback or Kindle eBook. There is still time to pre-order, right up to publication day (1 June), when the title is distributed to selected bookshops and opens for online purchase. Copies can be purchased through this website’s Buy Andrew Scott’s Books button here https://andrewmurrayscott.scot/home/buy-my-books/ or via online retailers. At this stage it looks as if the new title will be the biggest seller yet and perhaps outsell Deadly Secrecy. Though each may be read as a standalone novel, there is strong evidence that a majority of readers return to buy previous titles or ones they have missed and the series goes from strength to strength. Thanks for your interest!

Sovereign Cause

Sovereign Cause

The fourth Willie Morton political thriller is now on Pre-order until the launch on 1st June. Copies of the paperback or eBook versions can be ordered online via the “Buy Andrew’s Novels” button on the Home Page or via his Author’s page on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2ZTuoCV where you can also catch up on previous titles in the series.

Andrew will be hosting a chat about the book on Friday 28 May on Zoom. Whether or not you have read any of the series you will be most welcome to join in the books chat and find out more about Willie Morton and it will be an opportunity to chat to the author and ask any questions you may have. To join the guest-list please send an email to: twacorbiespublishing@gmail.com or contact Andrew direct via social media or via the “Contact” button on the Home page.

All the titles can be read as standalone novels and the series is picking up readers with each new title, some of whom go back to read the previous novels. In the fourth, Willie investigates a thirty-year old conspiracy around the early death of a Treasury mandarin whose report may have been politically inconvenient and it takes him from the labyrinths of Whitehall to the back-alleys of Barcelona and into danger as two governments seek to bury a secret of the past.

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