Interview by James Taylor

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‘The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

So says Virginia Woolf, the famous chronicler of twentieth century London life. A century later, it’s a reflection that applies equally to another chronicler – one whose own eminence is now confirmed with his new novel, Caledonian Road. A three time Booker Prize nominee and Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year winner, Andrew O’Hagan was always working to the highest of expectations.

After the runaway success of his previous novel, Mayflies – a very different work to Caledonian Road, in tone and texture, O’Hagan has (again) received uniformly rapturous praise from all quarters. And it’s causing conversation – as I type this introduction in a packed Glasgow cafe on Sauchiehall Street, a couple a few tables from me are animatedly discussing Caledonian Road’s opening chapters.

Running at more than 500 pages, Caledonian Road is a deliciously panoramic, suitably thick slice of London life, encapsulating the diversely interlinking lives that intersect down the titular route.

But it’s also a melancholy tribute to Glasgow, and a version of Scottish life lost to the past. Campbell Flynn, the novel’s central figure – a public intellectual with questionable contacts – is a tenement Glaswegian at heart beneath the criss-crossed London lattice of parties, celebrities and public controversy. Into his life comes hotshot student Milo Mangasha, who will be Flynn’s salvation – and his downfall.

In the weeks running up to its release, Andrew shared the kaleidoscopic visions behind his new novel, in a dusky Edinburgh pub aptly surrounded by all kinds of folk and folk of all kinds – a novel as heart-stopping as it is door-stopping, more than a decade in the making.

Glasgow Review of Books (GRB): I understand you’ve been working on this novel for over ten years, from its initial inspiration which came in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis?

Andrew O’Hagan (AH): More or less around that time – I was looking at some notes for the book today, and realised there was one day where I was dealing with an aristocratic part of the research, people involved in the Royal Family and that wider world, and later in the day I was seeing drill artists! The journey between each part of this book was huge – that memory was from more than ten years ago, and I would say the initial spark happened, as you say, in 2008, definitely.

GRB: You’d been dropping wee hints about it in interviews for years now, and it’s dominated your writing life for some time – with the huge exception of Mayflies, which you wrote during its composition. How did you balance the two works, and how was it returning to the panorama of London after Mayflies?

AH: I think it probably added to my outrage. It’s a very brilliant question that, because I think that it’s very seldom you find yourself in that position. I had never been in that position before, I was writing one book and I stopped to write another, but it just so happened that I knew that Mayflies was a book I could write over a year. It was present to me, it was there, it was urgent. When I went back afterwards to write Caledonian Road, I was even more upset about the inequalities in society than I had been, which fed largely into the book I think.

GRB: Caledonian Road and Mayflies portray two different worldviews, and with that, two very different ways of approaching the novel form – how do these differences cooperate for you as a novelist, especially with both works being written almost simultaneously? Caledonian Road is a cynical indictment compared with Mayflies’ more affectionately observed nostalgia and emotion, particularly in regard to male friendship and connections.

AH: It does; I don’t think that novelists should be sandwich boards, and I don’t think they should be sandwich boards for their own view of the novel either.

The novelists that I grew up admiring ranged through periods in their own talent, as painters do. You don’t look at Picasso and think, the Blue Period was a bit weird, and suddenly there’s these rather post-cubist pictures. You just accept the growth of the human being, especially of someone writing or working in the arts. It’s a responsibility you take on to never repeat yourself, to never take it for granted that you’ve solved the problem of ‘what is a novel’. You’re going forward.

I wanted to write something really entertaining, really page turning, fully engaged with the interconnectedness of our times, the estrangement of our times, the way that our liberal causes and our right wing thugs don’t seem that far apart. I wanted all of that to be part of a big living novel, a big organism.

So, Mayflies isn’t an organism in that way, it’s a chamber-piece, just as composers will produce capriccios and chamber-pieces and sometimes hymns, and sometimes a song, then they’ll do a symphony. That is the way I think novelists innately are too. So, it felt like a no-brainer to me – I knew that this was a different scale of piece. I had to do what was right by that scale and by that piece, but it’s not one of my minor pieces, it’s not a chamber piece, it’s not a little sonata.

I’ve written sonatas –  Be Near Me is a sonata, it’s a quiet piece with four people. But this is an unquiet piece with sixty people. And readers, book-buyers, sometimes what they want is a big, involving, compendious, state-of-the-nation extravaganza, which takes them through the summer, takes them through the Easter holidays, drives them into a place where they’re like, ‘oh my god, I need to find out what happens to all these people’, and why is their existence on one page related to existences on another page. That is what we learnt from the Victorian novel, and I don’t think that’s over, as a passion.

GRB: Why do you think readers still have this passion? The compendious state-of-the-nation novel can seem like a daunting task, which is perhaps why we don’t seem to see them published with the same regularity as the U.S, for example.

AH: I think it’s the compendious nature of the comedy. People love the notion that what troubles us also makes us laugh. We forget that sometimes in discussions about what fiction is, where we think that there are comic novels and there are literary novels, one of the things about the nineteenth century was that it gave us all of it together.

Sometimes the most comic novels were also the most popular, and the most serious, and the most state-of-the-nation. I give you Dickens, I give you Trollope, I give you Thackeray. These people were alive to the innate comedy of human experience, good and bad, happy and sad. That’s what people get involved in, that’s why they love box sets, that’s why they love soap operas.

But with a literary novel, I think what you can do is actually create a technical excitement, where people are really experiencing life on the page like it is in life, only more organised, where you’re landing all the planes simultaneously. That to me was a thrill. It was a thrill I didn’t know that I had in store, actually, when I started.

GRB: It’s certainly a thrill to read!

AH: I’m so delighted to hear that – I mean, you’re one of my first readers, and I’ve had nothing but a kind of wave of response to this book and it’s been amazing to watch. You know, you’re on your own, as a writer, and during the years that it takes to make a book like this, you’re on your own. I’ve always believed at the centre of it was something that would help people see their times. That’s always the kind of book I loved reading growing up, books that would help me see the times.

GRB: It reminded me a little of Middlemarch – the way each of us act as estuaries and tributaries flowing in and out of each other’s lives, even when we’re unaware of it. Henry James called Middlemarch a ‘baggy monster’, and you’ve associated Caledonian Road with the Henry James idea of ‘a huge grotesque epic of London society’. But, as Milo [Mangasha] says – ‘Fuck Henry James. We’re all on the Net.’ This was about authenticity, or lack thereof [. . .]

AH: Or the secrecy! The idea that we live as containers of our secrets, as well as people who have relationships, and connections; you, and your consciousness, and me and mine, are receptacles of the secret. That seemed fundamental to the novel for so long, but now with technology, it now begins to appear that undisclosed material appears, to some members of a generation, to be a form of underhandedness – to have a secret is to be underhand.

I might still make an argument personally that secrecy is an important component in business, in love or sex, or in various transactions between human beings. But you might still say, but why not make it explicit, why not put everything on the blockchain? Why not make everything obvious? That is one of the arguments that’s [debated] in the book – now as you rightly point out, I’ve said [otherwise] elsewhere, and in a sense I’m with Henry James, me, personally, Andrew O’Hagan, the author of this book.

That does not mean the people in my book are going to be like me! That’s really what you’re talking about – the distance between the author of a book like this, and a highly populated novel. There is no expectation that those people are avatars of me.

That’s the thing, as we were walking down here, you kindly said, it’s different from a lot of novels you see now which are obsessed with one point of view. One of the senses in which I’m trying to interrupt that habit of solipsism which exists at the moment, is to say; you can write a book in which every single character is not like you, they do not carry your editorial [sense], your worldview, your politics.

None of the characters – and there are sixty characters in this book! – carries my personal view precisely. They’re able to argue it back against me – like the thing with Henry James – fuck Henry James, Milo says. Well, that makes perfect sense to me, as a novelist. I don’t happen to think abolishing privacy is a particularly good idea, but who cares – that’s what Milo thinks.

And animating what others think, seems to me still a potential project for the novel. The novel hasn’t become an auto-fictional, closed device, all about the single consciousness of the writer. There are beautiful books, by the way, in that mode, and we know what they are, but that’s not just what this is.

GRB: These internally fragmented, individualised novels, I might suggest, are actually symptomatic of what they’re trying to diagnose – this disconnect that everyone feels from each other, the benefits capitalism enjoys from this disconnect, and not having ways of empathising with each other. A lot of contemporary novels reflect that as a realist modality, but the huge panoramic novels of Dickens or Eliot were a way of antidote; the space of fiction is a landscape in which we can regain this sense of community and duty to each other, building bridges between the islands of ourselves.

AH: That makes sense to me. There’s an estrangement effect in society at the moment, there has been for some time, where people who might empathise, who might look at each other and say, you’re made of similar stuff to me, and I’m going to find the confluence, I’m going to find the material that joins us – that’s become unfashionable. Where people [say] instead, you could never be me.

I look at you, a younger man than me, you’re a Scottish man, you’re made of material quite like mine, you come from a culture very close to mine, you know – I wear my hair this way, you wear your hair that way, there’s a difference in eye colour, in this and that. But fundamentally, we’re creatures of a similar type.

The idea that I would spend my life trying to find the definite differences between us, and make them cultural, and make them insurmountable [. . . ] I couldn’t speak to you, I couldn’t imagine your world, I couldn’t imagine you walking down this street, or having thoughts or having sex or going to sleep, I couldn’t imagine that – is that what I’m being told? I find that ludicrous – I find that anti-creative, I find it dictatorial and quite fascistic, to be honest. I think there has to be a fight back on that – that we can marry our own intelligences and creativity to other peoples, and we can visualise and recreate each other’s experience. I grew with that, I loved that.

I mean, Emily Bronte wasn’t Heathcliff, you know! She was a teenage girl imagining a passionate foreigner, to her. You must always remember that – she created a masterpiece, with her mind, with her empathy and her heart. The idea that we can’t do that anymore – that Emily Bronte [should only have] written slim novels about anorexic girls who live in the Yorkshire moors? It’s bonkers to me – she expanded from her little body into imagining elemental, universal, Greek craziness around the Yorkshire moor, and God bless her, she made a masterpiece. And so, I’m going to take my cue from her, not from people who think we should all shush, and just pay attention to who we are ourselves.

GRB: We’ll all just end up writing autobiographies at that point – not that memoir or autofiction can’t produce great art, but it limits your palette to black and white, in a sense. 

AH: And good luck to them! And if they can produce a great book about their individualism, then that’s to be admired. But the idea that we can’t look at each other [. . .]

GRB: When we think of the classic, state-of-the-nation novel much was written to expose the injustices and inequalities present among the grand dramatis personae it brought together. Dickens always had a Tiny Tim, a Little Dorrit, to bring social injustice to the attention of the echelons of his readership. This is present in Caledonian Road too, on an almost global scale – human trafficking, MeToo, political corruption [. . .]

AH: I went to those garment factories. I did the thing that I always promised myself I would do, which was to never describe situations which I hadn’t fully loaded up on, researched, and become familiar with.

That was true of the traffickers, it was true of the oligarchs, the aristocrats, the drill gangs, and it was true of the Bangladeshi women who work in those factories in Leicester. I went there, I went into those factories and examined the lives being lived, and spoke to everybody.

This is a book that is full of reported truth. I didn’t want to ever be in a position where I was kind of guessing. I don’t think you need to, anymore than Dickens needed to. If Dickens was writing about an orphanage, he went to the orphanage, that’s what he did. That gives a wonderful example – now, he wasn’t an orphan himself, he wasn’t Jewish, or Black, he wasn’t from exactly the same circumstances as a lot of the people he was writing about. He found his way towards exactly what they would say had been their experience.

GRB: Reportage has been such an integral factor of your life as an author, and more than half of it as a writer-at-large. You started off your career as a journalist. Your debut, The Missing, was a meta-genre piece of reportage.

AH: And I was only twenty-four then, you know. Wandering into these worlds, I didn’t really know how to interview people, but everyone spoke to me. I ended up with this story – it was across genres, people didn’t know where to put it in the bookshop.

GRB: Was writing Caledonian Road, then, also exercising your journalistic muscles as much as your fictional ones? How do they operate for you, discreetly, or co-operating, pumping at the same time like two ventricles in the same heart?

AH: It was one heart, it really was. It’s not to say I wasn’t using the whole heart, when I wrote nonfiction or [other] novels before, but in this case, the blood was pumping faster, and there was more of it. It was a bigger body, it was a whole Leviathan that was being oxygenated. To stick with your metaphor, that whole body just needed much more of me, it needed more energy, application, detail, structuring.

But, the thing is, people should just enjoy it as if there was no effort involved, it’s just if the world of this book was always there. You don’t fly in a plane and think, why is it up here, how is it going to get down? You don’t! You trust to the mechanism, in the technique, and to the skill of the pilots that it’s going to get to its destination, that it’s going to land and you’re going to be safe.

I think it’s the same with fiction. It’s my job not to tell you what the engines are doing, but just to do it. But I can tell you, I had to build those engines, I had to invent that flight, I had to GPS the whole thing from one spot to the next. It was one of the great tests and thrills of my life. Seeing the way people are reacting to it is the second greatest thrill. But it was years, and it took years for a reason, it took years to build that engine and solve that puzzle and get the direction clear. It took everything I had.

GRB: Would you do it again, write another novel of this scope? Caledonian Road is incredibly on the pulse, in the way Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet was, or Olivia Laing’s Crudo. The post-pandemic era, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, acts as a canopy to the internal drama of the novel, even though you began its composition over ten years ago.

AH: It’s a technical thing again. I kept shunting the action forward, through all the years of research. I had these characters, I had their deep history, and their lives, and their pasts, already in process ten years ago, for many of them. I just kept growing with them, it was like growing with their lives, until I was ready to debut them.

Everybody from the Dukes, to the art historian at the centre of the book, Campbell Flynn, to the boys on the streets, the oligarchs, the actors. I had been in rehearsal with them all these years, and writing them and forwarding the action.

But then there came a point, at the end of 2019 into 2020, where I decided that this book would be set in 2021. And then of course I had to contend with the pandemic. I wanted to make sure that the action of the book wouldn’t be in the pandemic, because I needed these people to meet!

So, that became a huge challenge. But I dealt with it everyday, and just kept focused on it, and again I knew that one day people would read this, now and into the future, as just a book set in time. I made it very carefully in response to the times, but kept manipulating it to fit the new revelations, and the new order. I wanted the book to be close to the time that people would initially read it.

GBH: The amount of everything that has happened in those ten years though [. . .] I wondered how differently the book might have been read or received, if its action had played out during the 2014 Referendum, Brexit, the early Trump administration. The rhetoric that Campbell and Milo use is so drawn from the macro-narrative of politics, internet discourse, cultural scandal and controversy.

AH: I like to think of it that way. Art is made in response to its times, but even if it’s a historical novel or a poem, you write out of time. And even iconic artworks, like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn – if Andy Warhol was alive today, would he be doing Marilyn? Probably not – that 1962 event, and then the work that he made, was iconic then and for all time, because it was responding to its moment, but it was in some larger sense about humanness, and how we live, who we are, how we’ve changed.

This book is like that too. Good books should help you to live your life, should give you a kind of code, about how to understand what you’ve experienced, and that felt very natural with this book. I mean, I felt that whether I’d set this book ten years ago, or in ten years’ time living forward, the essential, central focus would have been the same. This was about individuals trying to live their truth, in relation to each other, but not quite not quite knowing what the truth was.

GRB: This interview will be published in the Glasgow Review of Books – and Campbell Flynn hails from Glasgow, before migrating to London like a devilish Dougal Douglas, a la Muriel Spark. Even though this is a London novel, in what ways did Scotland and Glasgow, whether socio-politically or personally, inform this new work for you? Scotland is both a place to escape from, and an alluring opportunity for peace and nostalgia, for many of the characters – it’s the subconscious landscape throughout the entire novel.

AH: Glasgow is a moveable feast, in my mind. It’s one of the most fascinating epicentres in the world. Historically, architecturally, socially, anthropologically, emotionally, in all those ways. It’s just one of the great centres of human experience, to me. I just happen to have been born there. I lucked out!

Therefore, you don’t leave that behind, [though] you might wander around the planet. Robert Louis Stevenson was never more of an Edinburgh son than when he was in Samoa, in the swamps. That’s what I mean about a moveable feast. Your nationhood, your sense of belonging, your origins, go with you. I’m a Glaswegian when I wake up in the morning, I’m a Scottish person all day, and I don’t see that as being a complication or a difficulty. I’ve gone everywhere with that advantage!

In my books though, the preoccupation with actual origins has always been quite deep, I can see that. Campbell wants to find his way back to a problem that was never solved, that’s just a psychological event in the novel, that’s just part of the drama of the book. That this man, who is such a success, doesn’t feel a success, he doesn’t feel he’s ever really arrived in his life. I think that’s a thing that a lot of people feel, they’ve never really arrived at their best self.

So, one of the things he looks back to is his past, his childhood; did he leave his essential self behind in that tower block, in Sighthill, in the North of Glasgow, did he never really, again, find this core self? Has he been playing, like the artists he admires, with perspective, and with selfhood, and with pictorial values the whole time? Has he been projecting himself rather than being himself? That is one of the core problems for Campbell Flynn.

You brilliantly suggest, I think, that it’s the landscape of the subconscious, and it is! Milo Mangasha’s Caledonian Road, as it turns out, isn’t the one in London, it’s the road to the Summer Isles in Scotland. It’s the idea that you can create another new world, back in the world that Campbell has had trouble with.

That’s what novels are like, you create these little moral machines, which help people to see all the perspectives and values that really surround them in their lives. That was it for me – Campbell’s trying to understand who he is, and a huge focal point for who he is, is there in the landing light of that flat in Glasgow, in his childhood.

GRB: Like the criticism he receives for his biography of Vermeer, that it implodes its subject into a void of personality, Campbell surrounds himself with a huge constellation of people to fashion his own personhood, to counter that lack in himself. It’s why he’s so drawn to Milo, I think – a fresh perspective on life, a dangerous one, vicariousness that Campbell can benefit from.

AH: I think that’s right. Every good book creates its own fashion, and some books announce that they’re not about one person, they’re not even selling the idea of one person. There might be only one author’s name on the cover, but they’re about multiplicity, their subject is otherness. All of us are other, to somebody, and the novel can get excited about that, rather than get defensive about it.

GRB: It’s not something Campbell always sees the benefits of – Campbell invokes E.M Forster in his plea of ‘only disconnect’ as his charmed life declines into scandal [. . .]

AH: This is a man who’s suffering from the internet – if only I could disconnect, if only I could escape the interconnectedness of our lives! But yet, he doesn’t really believe in that in the end, he’s constantly living by his instinct to connect, whether it’s to Milo, or to his friends, or to the culture that he’s in, he’s struggling with it hugely, because he’s not sure that he can connect to this anymore. Disconnection would probably be a relief for him, halfway through this book.

GRB: You’ve written a lot about the internet and digital culture in your non-fiction too – Bitcoin, Satoshi Yakomoto, the platform’s potential for duplicity and multiplicity, the double self – I felt a real resonance there with the concerns of Caledonian Road.

AH: It’s really exciting for me, this question. I could see, given that I’d been up close with some of the biggest hackers and digital innovators of our era, in non-fiction, I’d been inside not only [Julian] Assange’s world but the world of Craig Wright, the purported inventor of Bitcoin, many individuals and their tribes, all of whom had a version of reality which was very different from the standard one, and different from mine.

What I found, over time, was that I was equipping myself to be able to create characters in fiction who really drove their project through to the end, as a hacker, as a benevolent activist. Milo was born out of all that research, really, where I realised that here could be a guy who resisted the complacency of the generations above him, who wasn’t willing to accept their sense of obligations, he was going to have his own obligations.

A lot of the confidence in making him came from an incredible experience I’d had with research – I didn’t even expect that myself, to be inside those houses, with those hackers, for so long, in those embassies, and all those places where I ended up. It definitely gave me a sense of the vigorousness of characters in the novel, but also of the calibre of the technology, that could bring down bad people, that it could dissolve bad actors in the middle of their activity. I’d seen it happen. I’d learnt from it. When I became the person who understood that technology, I could give it to my characters.

So, the novel evolves morally all the time, in relation to technology as much as to gender and sexuality, and any of the other topics that should affect morality. Race, economics; they’re always changing what we think of as the good self, as the good man. The problem of this novel is that it starts with a man who thinks he’s a good man – it’s a philosophical entertainment, on the idea of the good man.

GRB: Do you think there are good people, in Caledonian Road?

AH: I really do, you know! They sustained me, and I hope they sustain the readers. Apart from anything else, we shouldn’t forget how funny a lot of them are. This is a comedy above all, to me. A comedy of ideas, certainly, a comedy of manners.

I don’t dislike a single person in this novel, you know that? I think they all have their humanness, even those aristocrats who behave appallingly, or those newspaper columnists who are willing to say anything, and who are so cynical. They still, to me, have an essential argument, a reason, a humanity. I live in a world where there are lots of people who I really, really don’t agree with, and I’m happy they’re here. I don’t want a world where everyone agrees with me, I really don’t.

It’s nice to be in a multiplicity, it’s also nice to have people who simply don’t believe one’s own view is the central one. It helps sharpen my mind, that other people don’t agree with me, always has. That’s the thing that Campbell finds so hard, he’s possibly not on the right side of history, all of a sudden. It drives him mad, it literally drives him out of his mind.

It drives him out of company with his children, his son especially, drives him against the University department, drives him out of so many areas of comfort for him, that just he’s a man on his own by the end. And that’s something that he caused, he just couldn’t accept that otherness, other views, contradiction, could enrich him, rather than diminish him. So he diminished himself instead, he did a terrible thing. He does a series of terrible things, in fact.

GRB: There is no denying, after finishing Caledonian Road, with a bitter but satisfying aftertaste, that there is a rot down to the core of the British establishment. Do we have hope for a better Britain, a better society? Do you see Caledonian Road as a hopeful novel?

AH: I mean it might sound perverse, but to me it’s a very optimistic book. When those two women meet in Camley Nature Reserve at the end, one an MP, one a therapist, both related to this falling man, in a very intimate way, they love him, but have watched him destroy himself, what do they say? They hug each other at the brow of the hill, and they say, ‘the future’s going to be different’.

Because they’ve learned, as I think we all have from this period of division, that the old prejudices will not stand. The old way of thinking about gender, sexuality, race, economics, unfairness, will not stand. I’ve seen that in my time. If I walked out of this pub and was hit by a bus, and my life was over tonight, I’d feel that had been achieved. The consciousness – not the thing itself has been achieved, that will take some time. But the sense that it cannot go on, has arrived.

You need to remember, you’re talking to someone who marched in the eighties with the miners, who believed that Clause 28 was a disaster, who believed in gay rights and gender freedom, who was there, not in any heroic way, but just in the way that teenagers and young people were then, thirty years before your time. The years have passed very, very quickly. I still think of myself as a young man in my head, because novelists eternally are both kind of everywhere and nowhere, that’s our job. But, we wanted these changes – the idea that we represent a generation that isn’t attentive to these changes is baffling to me.

GRB: Caledonian Road shows that we’re all indebted to each other in ways we don’t even know, can’t fully fathom. For all the cynicism of the novel, it’s a profound concept, quite a haunting one actually.

AH: I love the changes [your generation] are bringing about, cause you’ve got to remember, we had parents too, and they fucking weren’t like me! They did not talk like me – I have a twenty year old trans son, and my mother and father wouldn’t have known how to live that. And I am proud, delighted, to have reached my middle age at a time when it’s obvious to me things are changing.

Does that mean we’re in a good political time? No. Does it mean there aren’t disasters and fears around us? No. There are! There is no way I would assume you sitting here, or me sitting here, or the man sitting next to you, I would make no assumptions – my parents did nothing but make assumptions.

Their generation, God bless them, were driven by prejudices about what Britain was, and what its ‘real’ make-up was. We resisted all of that, and the result, I really believe – it’s there at the core of Caledonian Road – is that it signals, and flags, a new way of thinking about the future. Old Britain is over. Not in a pessimistic way; [in that] the worst of it will not be tolerated. I was about to say we’re in a golden period of enlightenment; that’s to come, but we’re on a better track than ever.

GRB: Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to The Glasgow Review of Books.

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