Caledonian Road

LoveReading Says

A walk down Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan is a walk through modern-day London, with all of its characters and complexities.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is a substantial novel, both in length and ambition. The reader is tipped off to this at the very start, when greeted with a list of 59 characters on the first two pages. Like Charles Dickens before him, O’Hagan is interested in all of them—from upper-class aristocracy to penniless pensioners.

London itself isn’t listed as a character, but it should be. Caledonian Road in Islington is the central axis, but readers are whizzed around the city to places including Piccadilly, Mayfair, the Burlington Arcade, the Ritz, King’s Cross. Even Deptford, in south-east London, gets a mention. 

At its core, this is a novel about money. Old money. New money. Russian money. No money. Who has it, who needs it, who is trying to get more of it.

The novel begins and ends with Campbell Flynn, an author and academic, with an impressive rolodex but secret money troubles. He soon strikes up a friendship with one of his students, Milo Mangasha, who teaches his professor the ways of the dark web and Bitcoin. Milo does this all while pursuing his secret plan to topple the establishment using his hacking skills. From there, the encyclopedic novel takes shape.

O’Hagan deftly captures that odd time in 2021 and 2022 when the country was grappling with both the fall-out from Brexit and the global pandemic. There is no doubting that this novel is anchored to modern times, with climate change protests, modern-day slavery, celebrity DJs, the pillaging of pension pots and cancel culture all contributing to the plot.

Whether you find the characters loathsome or sympathetic probably depends very much on your world view. But it is never boring on Caledonian Road and well worth a visit.

Maureen Stapleton

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