In his latest novel, Andrew O'Hagan characterises almost every aspect of his society as broadly criminal, in one sense or another.
It is Thursday May 20, 2021, and Campbell Flynn – “tall and sharp at fifty-two a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished” – makes his way along Piccadilly to sign copies of his latest book, a life of the painter Vermeer that the Financial Times has declared “a work of mesmerising empathy”.
O’Hagan offers a portrait of this great unravelling. His novel follows a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters whose lives are entangled along a single London thoroughfare. Merciless satire Caledonian Road differs from novels with a comparable conceit – John Lanchester’s Capital , for example, which also visited residents on a single road in South London in the wake of the global financial crisis – in that its canvas is much broader, its aim sharper, its satire merciless.
common to first-generation English Russians, of taking the high life for granted; the thing he didn’t take for granted, but was driven towards like a sniffer dog, was the low life of the United Kingdom. Where his father and his friends wanted the imprimatur of Ivy League universities, dinners with princes, a club membership or a gong from the Queen, Yuri wanted, more than anything, the attention of meatheads and drug dealers, hookers and party boys, art-crook impresarios and online pirates.
Campbell’s teaching post in UCL’s English Department, where his colleagues resent his public-intellectual status, places him on a collision path with a bright young computer science student named Milo Mangasha, the son of an Irish cabbie father and Ethiopian-born schoolteacher mother. Campbell sees something of himself in Milo – “The boy was working class, like Campbell used to be” – and is willingly drawn into a relationship of mutual education.
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