You may inform when an American novelist goes to make use of their ebook to say one thing in regards to the nation. The hero of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March lets us know on web page one which he’s “an American, Chicago born.” The identical could be mentioned of postcolonial novelists. Consider Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Kids, saying on the story’s begin that “on the exact on the spot of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.” The authors of Nice American Novels and different nationwide counterparts have a tendency to focus on one character who serves as a stand-in for better nationwide themes and experiences—consider the narrator-protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Lucy Ellmann’s Geese, Newburyport, or V. S. Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas and Alexis Wright’s Trigger Man Metal.
By comparability, British writers take a extra panoramic method to writing fiction with nationwide stakes. Since a minimum of the early Nineteen Eighties, novels corresponding to Martin Amis’s Cash and London Fields, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, John Lanchester’s Capital, Jonathan Coe’s Center England, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and now Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Highway have been learn and obtained in public life as a style now known as the “state-of-the-nation novel.” Moderately than focus consideration on a single, symbolically freighted protagonist, British state-of-the-nation novels function giant casts of numerous characters linked to 1 one other by intricate plotting and unlikely coincidences that event ethical soundings and scourings. As they arrive collectively, the person tales of those arrayed characters afford an prolonged event for a chronicling cum evaluation of the nation’s collective life. The therapy is reliably extreme, usually by the use of chilly, arduous satire, if at instances additionally a supply of affecting emotion.
In different phrases, British state-of-the-nation novels are written within the lengthy shadow of Charles Dickens, however one by no means says so outright. That may be too apparent and predictable, and likewise would increase the query of whether or not British novelists with pursuits in interrogating the soul of their nation should still be drafting off the tactic and mannequin of a legendary forebear greater than 150 years useless.
Caledonian Highway, O’Hagan’s seventh work of fiction, appears effective with that prospect. The ebook is darkly and sometimes brilliantly alive to the present state of Nice Britain, with its infirm King and disarrayed royal household; its roiled nationwide politics, marked most not too long ago by the decisive election of a magisterially bland new Labour prime minister, who’s succeeding a 14-year run of smug, clownish, incompetent, and at last slight Conservative predecessors; and its common malaise in regards to the post-Brexit financial system in addition to the state of the health-care system, colleges, and social cohesion.
Compensated for with a bluff nationwide delight, up to date Britain can also be stuffed with fear about its slipping prominence on the planet and, on the identical time, its vulnerability to the malign pursuits of Russian oligarchs and the determined hopes of undocumented migrants. Characters from each teams determine importantly in Caledonian Highway as a part of a forged of 60-odd folks, together with dukes and duchesses, lords and girls, truck drivers and teenage rappers, environmental activists and laptop hackers, artwork sellers, actors, newspaper columnists, members of Parliament, political and authorized fixers, publishing folks, multigenerational immigrant households, and indignant outdated Englishmen and Englishwomen.
The novel’s fundamental character, Campbell Flynn, is “tall and sharp at fifty-two,” a “tinderbox in a Savile Row go well with.” He’s more than happy with issues as of Might 2021, as British life begins to emerge uncertainly if jauntily from the coronavirus pandemic, like a rich outdated lady with dangerous knees and a few G&Ts in her. Flynn enjoys a plummy place as an in-demand commentator who “makes use of his studying to query every thing from Adam Smith to vampire novels,” following the important and industrial success of his accessible but clever biography of Vermeer. He’s turn out to be an everyday at concepts festivals and thought-leader summits, he podcasts for the BBC, he’s simply revealed a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic in regards to the phenomenon of liberal contrition, and he’s ignoring an invite to jot down a column for Harper’s.
He has additionally completed a brand new ebook in regards to the suppressed disaster of male psychological well being, Why Males Weep in Their Vehicles, which he considers essential and likewise a surefire moneymaker. However, uncomfortable with the thought of being related to a ebook of questionable mental heft, he doesn’t need to be recognized because the creator. So Flynn publishes it anonymously and hires a good-looking younger actor to play the creator, which backfires when the actor decides to attract on his regressive, laddish intellectualism to carry the ebook’s arguments to life. Individuals in Flynn’s gossipy elite media and enterprise circles quickly start to find his true relationship to the ebook, which threatens each his hopes for lucre and his mental bona fides.
That is distressing. Perpetually residing above his means, he wants the cash so as to maintain his life-style going till his aristocratic mother-in-law lastly dies and bequeaths her property (no spoiler alert wanted for what occurs there), and he’s simply been requested to ship a prestigious lecture on the British Museum. In the meantime, his spouse is a trendy and gracious psychiatrist whose sister married a duke; his kids are a cerebral lesbian style mannequin and a hyperkinetic globe-trotting DJ. His closest mates and members of his prolonged household occupy distinguished positions in British society. And he’s particularly grateful for all of this given his pinched Glaswegian upbringing and the fatalistically modest lives of his late mother and father. “That was the state of affairs” for Flynn, O’Hagan writes, as he’s about to be pushed by London to a style home to seek the advice of on names for a brand new fragrance. “That, and the truth that he’d stopped paying his taxes.”
O’Hagan deftly deploys Flynn as a variously understanding, unwitting, and selectively ignorant nexus for up to date Britain’s many transferring elements and gamers. Flynn’s finest pal, William Byre, is a scandal-ridden, patrician clothes mogul who laments about his social-justice-warrior son—who “desires to provide all my cash away to wind farms and transgenders”—and whose spouse is an arch conservative columnist at a progressive information website. Past his home difficulties and his more and more public issues with sweatshop sourcing and #MeToo allegations, Byre is in deep debt to Aleksandr Bykov, a Shakespeare-quoting, iron-fisted Russian billionaire who enjoys life in “London, the perfect of all laundering-places.” What makes it the perfect? The nation’s family-run and public charities, its elite universities, analysis institutes, galleries, and cultural organizations, want some huge cash to maintain issues going correctly. That is granted to them by legitimacy-seeking international oligarchs, who—the novel makes express, in a pointed political barb—function confidently inside authorized rights supplied by successive conservative governments. In parallel, these identical getting older, venerable establishments are determined for relevance and public consideration, which is conferred upon them by intellectuals like Flynn.
That the nation’s cultural establishments rely upon swaggering oligarchs and intellectuals is a connection that Flynn’s prize pupil, Milo Mangasha, is fast to see as he will get to know his swish professor and surfaces Flynn’s unacknowledged connections to London’s grimier elites. Milo is a savvy, hardscrabble Ethiopian Irish computer-science grad pupil loyal to a crew of tough mates. He inherited a radical egalitarianism from his late mom and needs to vary the world by hacking it, which turns into potential after Flynn hires Milo as a researcher for his British Museum speak. As a part of the gig, Milo agrees to show an enthralled Flynn about bitcoin and the darkish net. Milo visits him at his well-appointed dwelling off a really completely different stretch of the Caledonian Highway from the place Milo shares together with his cab-driving widower dad. Earlier than leaving, he steals Flynn’s passport, on a hunch. Flynn is about to fly to Iceland for a nightclub party organized by his son; he makes a fast name to a well-placed pal and acquires a substitute passport with ease, confirming Milo’s sense that even when Flynn isn’t an oligarch, and regardless of his excited, proud plan to assail the British Museum in his speak on the British Museum, he profoundly advantages from the injustices of Britain. Even so, as Milo places it, “he thinks he’s one of many good guys.”
That is amongst O’Hagan’s extra looking and searing themes: the necessity of Britain’s intelligentsia and native-born elites to think about themselves stewards of an amazing custom of nationwide life, even whereas it’s ever extra propped up by outsiders whose very presence and strategies erode the vaunted British worth of truthful play. This dependence is clear in one of many novel’s extra tightly wound storylines, involving the undocumented sweatshop staff making garments for Byre’s enterprise. Byre wants to show a significant revenue so as to keep away from Bykov’s presumably life-threatening calls for to be paid again. In the meantime, Bykov is the one trafficking these staff into the nation. That is simply a part of Bykov’s enterprise, each shining and underground, which additionally funds medical analysis and floats the artwork market. He’s contracted the human trafficking out to a person named Bozydar, whose mom, upset about her son’s work, declares, “‘We’re good folks … It pains me to suppose in any other case.”
It is a nice transfer on O’Hagan’s half, to shift consideration from the perpetually opining Flynn and assign an incisive declare to an getting older, lower-class, devout-Catholic Polish immigrant about why folks like Flynn (and herself) ignore their private profit from the injustice and decay of up to date Britain. They’re satisfied that they’re good folks. How they work and stay contradicts this. In order that they discover methods to keep away from the contradiction.
Certainly, O’Hagan by no means lets Flynn off simple, even when this implies he’s comfortable on myopic and righteous Milo, whose far-reaching hackery brings down dangerous actors and reroutes soiled cash to assist idealistic causes, such because the founding of a dubious-sounding folks’s collective on a distant northern island. After Flynn delivers his blistering mental assault on the vanity of the British Museum for not going through as much as its imperialist roots, he blissfully walks out of the occasion he’s headlining. “Moving into Nice Russell Road, he felt a rush of clear air with the odor of roasting chestnuts, and he gave £50 to a homeless man, feeling in that second that he understood and was at one with all of the exploited folks of the metropolis.” He enjoys this inflated feeling of class-transcending solidarity so long as he ignores one drawback: Mrs. Voyles, the depressing outdated woman renting his basement flat.
Enter Dickens.
Caledonian Highway is an outstanding state-of-the-nation novel, the best in a few years, however what lastly issues is its efficacious literary family tree. Predating and transcending classifications of what a nationally minded ebook is and isn’t, novels corresponding to Bleak Home and Our Mutual Good friend established what big-canvas, formidable works of up to date fiction contain: balancing humor with ethical criticism, innocence with connivance, secrets and techniques with exposures, whereas additionally creating sudden, story-changing connections between disparate characters excessive and low, wealthy and poor, younger and outdated, native and newcomer.
Dickens invented the very sort of ebook that O’Hagan has written. Caledonian Highway options the entire aforementioned parts and likewise, extra plainly transferring alongside basic Dickensian strains, a chapter-long homicide trial on the Previous Bailey involving a poor younger Black man who by no means had an opportunity, and a facet story a couple of simpleminded, fairly younger lady, used and abused by a strong man, who’s ultimately discovered useless by a crusading journalist. A number of characters die throughout the novel’s 600-plus pages, however as a result of, like Dickens earlier than him, O’Hagan makes you root for them and in some circumstances towards them, you need to uncover all of this instantly, together with what occurs with decrepit, viper-tongued outdated Mrs. Voyles (even the identify!). She ruins Flynn’s day each time she has the possibility to excoriate him for having fun with the excessive life whereas she suffers within the shabby flat instantly beneath him. Flynn desires to do proper by Mrs. Voyles, sincerely and responsibly, like a great home-owning city elite, however she received’t give him the pleasure of it, to his rising frustration, which turns to rage when he has had sufficient and leaves his pretty home one evening, going “into the Caledonian Highway and the approaching darkish.”
This darkness has arrived and is all-pervading in O’Hagan’s convincing imaginative and prescient of up to date Britain. It covers the highly effective and unknown alike. All of them search benefit and alternative in a shadowland that paradoxically sustains and corrupts the majestic concept of Britain. Venerable and very important, subtle and stalwart, dignified and redoubtable, the nation is genuinely interesting not despite however due to the truth that it’s turn out to be so appallingly simple to control to your personal functions, whether or not you’re born in it, lecturing about it, shopping for into it, shopping for it, or risking your life in a packed, fetid delivery container simply to enter it.
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