Andrew O'Hagan and the curse of the state-of-the-nation novel

His new book Caledonian Road aims high, but does it hit the mark?

Andrew O’Hagan. Credit: Christina Jansen

The state-of-the-nation novel is an elusive beast. Like the snow leopard it is more often discussed than spotted in the wild.

If you are regularly in the company of writers you will be familiar with a particular discussion in the pub in which everyone laments the absence of a big, bold, chewy book that captures the spirit of our times.

After a few drinks a writer may even admit to having 10,000 words of a state-of-the-nation novel tucked away in a digital folder on their computer, labelled with with a misleading name - “tax”, perhaps, or “seminar” - to put literary executors off the scent.

These works will only rarely trouble an agent’s in-box. Usually they remain forever drafts.

Why? Because to write a state-of-the-nation novel is to have a self-confidence, a bravado, a sheer recklessness most writers lack. To tackle such a project requires ambition on a different scale from any other literary endeavour. It is a rare writer who will say: I know I have the skills equal to this task.

Step forward Andrew O’Hagan. Advance proofs of his new novel Caledonian Road came with a promotional quote from Monica Ali that stakes the book’s claim: “A brilliant state-of-the-nation novel that pulls down the facades of high society and knocks over the ‘good liberal’ house of cards.”

I salute O’Hagan for having the balls to take on such a project. But does he succeed?

Here we run into a thicket of literary bylaws about what a state of the nation novel should be and whether the very idea is cursed and doomed.

I struggle to name more than a handful of true state-of-the-nation novels in modern times. By my definition this is a novel that reveals a moral truth about the society we live in, with a breadth of scope and a depth of insight other fiction and non-fiction fails to match. A successful state-of-the-nation novel becomes an emblem of its age.

You may cavil, but for me the only successful state-of-the-nation novels of the past half a century have been Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Martin Amis’s Money and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, all of them about the excesses of the 1980s.

More recent books have conveyed specific communities with richness and complexity. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, for example. Others have held social, political and economic aspects of modern Britain up to the light, the better to examine its flaws. Ali Smith’s seasons quartet does this, while also being a meditation on love, time, literature and art.

But these are not state-of-the-nation novels by my admittedly narrow definition, and nor, I think, would the authors claim them to be.

Other writers - Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, James Robertson, Salman Rushdie - have successfully given us a sweep of social history over time, but according to my pernickety strictures a state-of-the-nation novel has to be about now, give or take a couple of years.

And so we have to ask a tricky question. Does the very fact of setting out to write a state of the nation novel doom it to failure? The risk should be obvious: the human stories you tell become secondary to the book’s purpose. Your characters become functionaries.

I admit my heart sank when I opened my 641-page copy of Caledonian Road to find a handy “cast of characters” at the start. There are 59 of them and I’m afraid the brief biogs - “Russian oligarch”, “a lynchpin human trafficker”, “editor of The Commentator”, “drill rapper, aka Ghost”, “notorious columnist”, “the Duke of Kendal’s lawyer”, “Tory peer”, “William Byre’s girlfriend, 23, Scottish”- allowed me to predict with some accuracy their personalities and their individual roles in the narrative I had yet to read.

From the off I was irked by O’Hagan’s flouting of the literary convention of “show, don’t tell”. We are informed in the novel’s opening three paragraphs that Campbell Flynn, the central character, is about to see his difficult childhood catch up with him; that he has “secrets and troubles”; that he is about to make a huge mistake; that “the worry he carried with him almost constantly was about money and his failure to to be as well-off as he should be”; and that his comeuppance is contained in a manuscript he is carrying in his briefcase. The GPS panel in his taxi gives an accurate weather forecast: “Bright, then showers.”

Perhaps this is a matter of personal taste, or worse, a consequence of my illiteracy about the narrative conventions of Dickens and Wilde and Trollope. Call me picky, but I want to discover the novel by myself, not be spoon-fed the central themes before I turn a single page.

My unkind thought as the story unfolded was that the novel read like a treatment for a TV series, complete with handy character summaries for the actors to absorb. And indeed Caledonian Road would make fantastic television. Who knows, maybe that was the plan all along. Perhaps the ideal state-of-the-nation novel is not a novel at all.

I am a big fan of O’Hagan so I came to this project with high hopes. His novels are refreshingly atypical of the literary fiction described by a writer friend of mine as “Booker bollocks”. Our Fathers is an underrated Scottish classic. Mayflies is a beautiful contemplation of friendship and mortality. But I think O’Hagan is a better writer of non-fiction than fiction. I greatly admire his work for the London Review of Books about Wikileaks and Bitcoin, and particularly his 60,000-word essay on the Grenfell Tower fire. This is work of boldness, ambition and craft. It demonstrates a scope and awareness rare in journalism and literature. If anyone can pull off a state-of-the-nation novel it should be O’Hagan.

Caledonian Road eventually won me over but it had to wrestle me to the ground. There are big plusses, not least the central character. Flynn is a celebrity academic, a public intellectual in many ways not unlike O’Hagan himself. Like O’Hagan he is a working-class West of Scotland boy a long way from home. Like O’Hagan he operates in a rarified high-society London very different from the world that formed him. Like O’Hagan he is a dapper and well-groomed man in his 50s not averse to good tailoring.

Andrew O’Hagan. Credit: Simone Padovani

In fact, I would not be surprised if many of the best lines in Caledonian Road were cut and pasted straight from O’Hagan’s autobiographical jottings in the Notes app on his iPhone, the 21st century equivalent of a commonplace book.

This may not be wise for me to admit but I found myself making a mental note of upscale London bars, restaurants and gents’ outfitters namechecked by Flynn. O’Hagan is particularly good on scents. Flynn’s signature fragrance is “the faded peaches of Mitsouko”.

The book’s big target is Russian money in high-society London, buying influence through philanthropy, political patronage and the international art market.

I hope it is no spoiler to say these tendrils find their way into people smuggling, modern slavery and illegal cannabis farms. This had me scratching my head. Was there really, in real-life Britain, a link between Russian oligarch money and smuggling migrants into the UK? I see no evidence of this.

This made me wonder if O’Hagan was making connections that did not exist in actual Britain. Was the author tinkering with the state of the nation in his state-of-the-nation book?

There are other problems. In a book many years in the making there is a sense the Russian theme has been overtaken by the war in Ukraine, making O’Hagan’s critique historical rather than contemporary. The main driver of the plot is Flynn’s attachment to a young student called Milo, who in turn educates and then exploits his mentor. The relationship does not ring true for me, nor does Flynn’s apparent gullibility. O’Hagan’s attempt to contrast his portrait of the white upper class with a plunge into the culture of black youth in North London feels perfunctory, albeit to someone like me with little experience of that end of the real Caledonian Road. A diversion into the pious world of Polish Catholics is more interesting, but ultimately a grace note.

O’Hagan is aware of the danger of characters becoming mere mechanicals. At one stage he has Flynn say to his daughter: “We want stories where everybody is against type, but such stories have no reality.”

I am sounding too negative. O’Hagan eventually lets the plot tell the story and each scene becomes a drive-by shooting. Almost every character is an ogre, all in different ways. So we have antique oafs with flats in Albany - I had to look up what Albany was - as well as primped monsters from the worlds of commercial art and high-end fashion. O’Hagan unpeels their awfulness with undisguised relish. There is much fun to be had speculating which real Labour peer and which actual Tory fixer these characters resemble. The Queen makes a fleeting appearance at one particularly fraught moment. Now that is an upscale cameo.

O’Hagan’s skills as a journalist provide some of the best set pieces: a Mayfair club that may or may not be the Atheneum; the Frieze art fair; a lecture at the British Museum; an achingly trendy nightclub in Reykjavik. The writing zings: “The party was busy, like filthy litter on a windy day.” I liked the description of a podcast as “a deep dive into the era’s shallows”. A cleric is described as “a rather deluxe bishop”. A truly awful female newspaper columnist is described so unsparingly I began to wonder how well the novel had been legalled.

In the end, does this work as a state-of-the-nation novel? Is it any more revealing than watching the news? Do we understand ourselves and our world any better, in any greater depth? Do we see connections in our society hitherto obscured from our sight? Do we feel we have looked ourselves in the eye as a nation, and seen something we had not noticed before?

I am not sure Caledonian Road hits that mark. I was also left unconvinced by Monica Ali’s claim that the book “knocks over the ‘good liberal’ house of cards”. Flynn’s gilded world of aristo connections and red-carpet invites is a far cry from the experience of most well-meaning Guardian readers, even those living in feather-bedded comfort. The world the book inhabits is too rarified, too niche to make a generalised claim about liberal hypocrisy in contemporary Britain. This barb does not land.

Where the book succeeds is as a psychological portrait of a successful man who never wholly escaped the dour, reductive, emotionally stunted home that formed him, and whose attempts to cauterise himself with wealth were doomed from the start. Those born rich never really have to worry about money. For all Flynn’s exquisite tailoring and hand-stitched English brogues, insouciance about wealth is one luxury in which he can never indulge.

At one art show, Flynn is drawn to a Flemish School painting of a shrouded corpse, with a Latin inscription that translates as: “And you will live in your father’s house forever.” Caledonian Road is the story of one man’s attempt to disprove that statement, only to confirm its cold, hard truth. Moments later Flynn is captivated by a beautiful, Glasgow-made, art nouveaux cabinet with stained glass panels and mother-of-pearl inlay.

He walked around it and touched the tiny pewter key.

“What does it cost?” he said. She disappeared for a second. And when she was gone he held the key firmly, then turned it.

In Campbell Flynn, O’Hagan has created an indelible character. While much of this book is a skim, Flynn has depth and resonance. He is a crisis waiting to happen, a man “with a profound lack of faith in his own decency”, who feels an “overwhelming need to walk through the flames and be cleansed”, who had been “ripe for a disturbance”. He seeks chaos and duly finds it.

His wife says to him at one point: “You may be in danger of becoming too fascinating to yourself.”

Ouch. Sair yin.

Flynn is O’Hagan’s greatest creation. When I closed Caledonian Road, what lingered was the scent of faded peaches.

# Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan is published today by Faber & Faber, £20

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What did you make of this review? Do you have a favourite state-of-the-nation novel? Are you a fan of O’Hagan’s work? Have your say in the comments:

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