What a joy, to pick up a book knowing that it’s going to take you on a journey, a steady hand at the helm ready to guide you, the reader, through. We know from the start that Campbell Flynn is in for a rough time of it from Andrew O’Hagan - the man can’t possibly remain as gilded and carefree as he appears on page 1 - we just don’t know when or from where his downfall will appear. 

He’s an academic, a writer, fashion aficionado, an art historian. He knows how to correctly employ others’ preferred pronouns. He’s come up in the world, from a working class Glaswegian childhood via a well-chosen marriage to the well-heeled leafy Georgian townhouses of north London. Campbell Flynn has Made Something Of Himself, and he just needs not to mess it up, despite the HMRC, his children, friends, relatives and downstairs tenant all conspiring to make life complicated for him. He’s blithe though; non-stick and charming.

London is a whole person in this book, specifically the area around Kings Cross and Caledonian Road. People exploit and endure, spinning in and out of each others’ orbit, occasionally improving but mostly making life a little bit worse for everyone around. The characters live and work in these streets, drinking coffee, making bets, attending school, dying here. Some also have second houses in Surrey, but really, so many of us do these days.

My only experience of this part of London was a visit to Coal Drops Yard last year; brunching in sunshine next to fountains in the square while we played at expensive metropolitanism. We saw the Gas Works apartments, wondered in non-Londoner’s astonishment at their cost, watched the Word on the Water floating bookshop opening up for business. It was a fleeting glimpse of a corner of the city that O’Hagan builds out for us in Caledonian Road. 

The book covers all the 2020s bases. Russian oligarchs, elitist art cliques, urban gangs, parenting, success, shame, housing crises, class wars, illness, relationships building and broken, crime, careers, cancellation, corruption, drugs, disappearances, truth and fakery. Somewhere along the road, O’Hagan will find one of your rawest nerves and dance a jangling jig upon it, exposing the tender places that are usually contemplated only while lying alone in the wee hours. You can’t resent him for the pain though, because in the process he’s built characters who are going through everything you’ve dreamed of - or feared - right along with you.

“Nothing in life was ever enough for them”

Caledonian Road weaves in so many actual people and events - human trafficking, Brexit, covid, climate activism, Grayson Perry, cryptocurrency (not in that order) - that it’s often hard to remember the fictionality of the pages. It all seems at once surreal yet entirely believable. I wanted to call out to many of the characters: urging one or other to be saved from themselves or from the danger that others would lead them into. Yet I knew that every time I read a heavy “Later, he would wonder…” the possibility of salvation only grew further away. 

But somehow it is not bleak, this brutal deconstruction of modern UK society. Caledonian Road might be Dickensian, but it’s also a tale of consequence and redemption. Redemption, however, does not always arrive directly at the door of the guilty party, appearing instead in butterfly ripples across time and community. And that, my weary friend, is why you must obtain and read the book immediately. Our lives are impactful, and we sometimes even get to choose how. Andrew O’Hagan will show us the way.

🎧 Attention Audiophiles 🎧

The audiobook of Caledonian Road is read by Michael Abubakar, who handles accents from Ayrshire to Vladivostok with accuracy and aplomb. Across class, age, gender and geography he never once strays into caricature. There are very few narrators who could have handled this book, and I’m glad it was him who took on the challenge. 

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