2024-10-25 08:52:00
Sometimes a street tells the story of an entire city. In the novel “Caledonian Road”, the writer Andrew O’Hagan draws a highly topical panorama of British society before and after Brexit. A meeting in London.
“The novel as such is absolutely spectacular in its form: it can take the reader into the heads and hearts of sixty characters and thus create a literary field of tension of revelation, truth and entertainment that no other art form can do! ” What writer Andrew O’Hagan is saying now seems unlikely in this place, out of place in a Scottish pub at the bottom of Caledonian Road in north London.
It’s a mild day in late summer and early autumn, inside the wood-panelled corner pub you can hear the sounds, smells and sights of a London pub afternoon: spilled beer, produce for cleaning, exhaust fumes from outside and fire sirens passing by, a lone drinker of his pint doesn’t look up as the Pixies run out of the facility. The pub, like almost all older ones in London, is an institution in its own right, it’s like a cave, built for those who want to briefly escape the noisy city without completely retreating from it.
Less than five minutes away, King’s Cross station with its old Victorian station buildings, where the Eurostar has connected the island with the European mainland since the mid-1990s, now seems like a stubborn reminder of the pre- Brexit. Just ten or fifteen years ago, Western Union branches, obscenely cheap flophouses, half-pound stores, strip clubs with rockabilly bars in the basement lined here alongside industrial warehouses. The area still feels small and lively, although there are now glass condominiums and better hotels promising contemporary satiety.
Die real Caledonian Road
A few steps further along Caledonian Road begin the loveliest northern neighborhoods of Camden and Islington. When the English social reformer Charles Booth wrote a study of the social structure of the city in the late 19th century, this neighborhood was the one where rich and poor were closest. Even today the N1, as the neighborhood is called according to the postcode, shows the proximity of council houses and villas, the Pentonville Road prison and the family home of future Prime Minister Tony Blair, worn-out laundromats and post-modern gastropubs with refined French British cuisine, atypical even by London standards.
Andrew O’Hagan, in the guise of the British intellectual – the clothes composed but put together not too emphatically, the expensive shoes, the expensive glasses, the gaze always close to irony, even towards himself – squints out the window towards the sun: “I came here when I was 21, a young man. The bus from Glasgow stops just two minutes from here. London was a different world then, it was still post-war London: cobblestones, gasometers, a certain squalor everywhere. The character of this street has changed significantly over the last twenty years, just as Britain has changed. I wanted to capture that in my novel.
Caledonian Road is what in England is called a state of the nation novel, a novel that captures the state of the nation, the social mood and its political turning points. Jonathan Coe wrote one with “Middle England” five years ago; before there were examples of Sam Byers and John Lanchester, the genre is an integral part of the British literary landscape; Yes, yes, an English friend will say the next day with a bit of mockery, each of our writers must probably write a novel about the state of the nation at least once in their life. Why actually?
Why do you try to retrace the most current situation of the country in a literary way in approximately 700 pages, preceded by a glossary of sixty different characters? And why, if you are an influential journalist and award-winning non-fiction author like Andrew O’Hagan, don’t you write an essay, but rather a novel? “So many things have happened,” O’Hagan says succinctly, “not just Brexit or Covid.”
Anyone who has followed the last twenty years in Great Britain knows what he means, the individual chapters of the country’s political development: the pop-cultural opening in the Blair years, whose catchphrase “Cool Britianinia” does not adequately reflect the changed mentality of the New York Times. Labor-Time then describes Labour’s approach to an American-oriented form of neoliberalism, followed by various variations of conservative and neoconservatism under David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The Europhile Liberal Democrats, who faded into insignificance after a brief moment of popularity. The bewildered latecomers of the former Tories, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
And now Keir Starmer, who, after a brief period of popularity, is struggling to set new trends beyond small-scale controversies such as the “winter fuel allowance” for pensioners. What was once clearly identifiable – not simply political positions, but a political programme, an ideological superstructure, a social idea – seems increasingly difficult to understand on both sides of parliament, almost non-existent. What was the turning point for all of this? O’Hagan reflects. “I think the war in Iraq was one of those points. The left-liberals began to make mistakes and a kind of smug coalition emerged. Liberalism, that is, left-wing liberalism, and elitism became one, and there was also a feeling of superiority. The Islington elite of this area became morally fat, so to speak, with the idea that they were blameless and absolutely righteous. I think this attitude has done a lot of damage.”
O’Hagan portrays an environment
“Caledonian Road” tells the story of Campbell Flynn, a successful art historian and public intellectual, and his colorful family. Flynn is in his fifties, comes from a poor Scottish background and is part of the intellectual-political elite. He teaches at a prestigious university marked by the madness of cancel culture, writes books and, as a ghostwriter, an ironic super-masculinist. bestseller “Why men cry in cars”. His wife is the daughter of a rich and cunning countess, his best friend is a dubious and affable industrialist.
Flynn’s life is filled with high-level conferences, inaugurations and social events. He seems such a typical representative of high society, perhaps of a type that can only exist in London, that in London you constantly think of meeting someone like him: when listening to talk shows on Radio Four, at dinner in the back rooms of the traditional “ Guinea Grill” in Mayfair, where hunchbacked waiters in waistcoats serve old-fashioned rare steaks, or a quick trip to Daunt’s Books on Marylebone High Street.
No, he wasn’t interested in portraying or even criticizing a particular social class, O’Hagan says in his clear Scottish drawl. It’s more about creating characters that can tell the story of our time on their own. Or is the novel, on which he spent ten years, not also a question of himself? “Now you’ve got me,” laughs Andrew O’Hagan, who, like his main character, grew up in simple circumstances in North Ayrshire, Scotland and is now, in his mid-fifties, one of the leading players in London intellectual: award-winning author and editor of the venerable literary magazine “London Book Review”. “It is true. Campbell Flynn has a lot of me, even though he’s definitely taller than me.” He was, as they say, “a good liberal” – what that meant interested him, O’Hagan says.
What does “liberal” mean if you don’t just understand it politically? An entire generation of leftists, who have always seen themselves on the right, progressive side of history, have failed or at least struggled with their standards and perhaps their self-image, O’Hagan says. “It’s universal. My generation – the one born in the late 1960s and early 1970s – wanted to change the institutions. But did we really do it? Or do we simply live in increasingly expensive homes? It’s not certain that we haven’t made any progress, but one thing is certain: there is a crisis of the liberal left in our society.” At some point the next generation will come along and challenge you.
In the novel, this is student Milo Mangasha, in his early twenties, who first becomes Campbell Flynn’s graduate assistant only to later betray him, which Flynn doesn’t notice because he’s too busy with his depressive self-loathing and his loss of meaning. : “He felt cut off from his reality,” he says at one point, “a man who had always believed in the stability of who he was.”
A conflict of generations?
So is there a generational conflict in Britain today? “I think that for Milo Mangasha’s generation it is just as easy to represent their life as to live it; Campell Flynn’s generation, on the other hand, can only understand their lives as an expression of real experiences, of truth. Flynn is writing a book about Vermeer, which really means writing about nothing, because almost no one really knows anything about Vermeer. Yet he writes a biography about him! Flynn believes in the idea of a true self. Millennials and Gen Z – and I say this as the father of a 20-year-old daughter – are fluid in their understanding of reality; the idea of an essential truth makes them nervous. In the novel, Flynn feels that his world is shaking and that the boys know how to take advantage of it.
Even as a man, Flynn remained standing: his crisis is also a crisis of masculinity which seems to have come to an end as a well-composed social satire. What does O’Hagan believe the form can do in literary terms? “I really wanted to reframe the novel,” says O’Hagan, “and create a reading experience. I thought to myself, there must be interest in a book that describes our society here and now and maybe even helps us live our lives.
So does he have a political, perhaps even moral, claim as a writer? Well, O’Hagan replies, for a writer who, like him, works in both the literary and journalistic fields, it’s always about combining fiction and fact. There are other literary cultures that approach this with more caution and skepticism than the British. “Fontane or Döblin have a completely different understanding of reality than Dickens – a much more fragmented and modern understanding of reality. We, on the other hand, try to create scenes more from stark reality.”
So is your novel an expression of political realism, told along the lines of a character who no longer trusts reality? “I wrote about a man falling apart. Of course he has to ask himself what he can change to find himself.” It would be better, says Andrew O’Hagan before he finishes the afternoon in the pub and goes out into the noisy street, with the finger in his hand to point, yourself and not others. You have the ‘obligation to do so, especially towards yourself.
Andrew O’Hagan: Caledonian Road. Translated from English by Manfred Allié and Gabriele Kempf-Allié. ParkxUllstein. 784 pages, 30 euros.
Mara Delius he is editor of the “Literarische Welt”.
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