(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