FICTION
Caledonian Road
Andrew O’Hagan
Faber & Faber, $34.99

Apologies to the late William Gass if I am misremembering, but I seem to recall him saying somewhere that the predominant literary form of the 20th century was the 19th century novel. The form is still ubiquitous, or at least conspicuous, well into the third decade of the 21st century.

A champion of the high modernist traditions of experimentation and formal rigour, Gass was predisposed to deplore the lack of ambition and general slackness that characterises far too much fiction. And he had a point. We no longer live in the world of Dickens and Gaskell, so it is not unreasonable to maintain that the contemporary novel has no business emulating them.

But there are some reasons why the basic template has proved so durable. When it is done well, as it is in Andrew O’Hagan’s hefty new novel, Caledonian Road, panoramic social realism can expose the inner workings of a society. The ability to move between social strata, dramatise the entangled lives of a large cast of characters in an agreeable “marriage of art and melodrama” (as O’Hagan has a character observe with reference to Balzac), inclines the form towards satirical observation and social critique.

O’Hagan is as known for his impressive body of reportage as his fiction. Caledonian Road, his seventh novel, which follows Mayflies, is smartly plotted, eminently readable and often amusing; it is also a scathing portrait of a society steeped in corruption. Set in a post-Brexit London described at one point as “the world capital of diseased finance”, it depicts a nation that has been hollowed out, materially and ethically.

The novel is populous enough to be prefaced with a handy two-page list of characters, but its central figure is Campbell Flynn, an art historian in his early 50s, a sort of off-brand Simon Schama, whose major achievement is to have written a popular biography of Vermeer larded with liberal-humanist platitudes that its readers have mistaken for profundities. Campbell has fallen upwards in life. He comes from a humble Scottish family, but has married into the aristocracy and now consorts with the wealthy and powerful.

Early in the novel, we learn that he is in financial trouble. Reluctant to admit this to his family, he plans to dig himself out of the hole with an ideologically dodgy potboiler called Why Men Weep in Their Cars, aimed squarely at the lucrative self-help market. To protect his reputation from this gauche undertaking, he enlists an actor to pretend to be the book’s author. The plan does not go well.

Campbell has just enough self-awareness to sense that the world is leaving him and his stale ideas behind. He becomes fascinated with a perspicacious young student named Milo, the computer-literate son of an Ethiopian-born activist, who seems to understand the present in ways Campbell does not. In cultivating Milo’s friendship, Campbell hopes to draw on his student’s insights to reinvigorate his thinking and better navigate the fraught cultural politics of the times. This plan also does not go well.