Centrist Dads Unreformed

“I have been a liberal all my life,” Andrew O’Hagan told an interviewer last April.

I have been on every march. But I have to look now and say: “Did we achieve as much as we hoped or did we let ourselves off too easily?”… We did well. We got the free education [British students didn’t pay for university until 1998], we got the equity, we got the houses. We must say to our children: “We owe you an explanation.”

Now, over the course of a 614-page novel, O’Hagan sets out to provide it (and a whole lot besides).

Caledonian Road’s main character is Campbell Flynn, who, like his creator, was born in working-class Glasgow in 1968, grew up with an alcoholic father, and went on to become a prominent London intellectual. As well as having written six previous novels—three nominated for the Booker Prize—O’Hagan is editor-at-large of the London Review of Books. Campbell, a distinguished art critic, has just written a best-selling life of Vermeer. He is also “Professor of Cultural Narratives” at University College London, hosts a popular BBC podcast called Civilisation and Its Malcontents, and—like O’Hagan—seems able to turn his hand to anything that interests him.

The similarities don’t end there. Considering himself “a liberal intellectual with a large capacity for social justice,” Campbell feels “he had given his life to insurgencies and advances…. He’d marched against Section 28,¹ he’d read every book on the fall of empire…yet his destiny, like everybody’s, was to fall short.” As a friend of his daughter’s tells him:

You won all the money. You won all the houses. You won all the second houses. You won all the institutions…. And now you have to win all the arguments as well? Would it really kill you to lose just once, and say, “We fucked up the world, so please help us”?

Being a good liberal—the type Robert Frost defined as “a person who can’t take his own side in a quarrel”—Campbell decides not only that this would not kill him but also that the help he needs to reform himself is close by: Milo Mangasha, a young, working-class student of his at UCL and “his favourite upsetter.” The computer-whiz son of a recently deceased Ethiopian activist mother and an Irish father, Milo wants nothing less than “a complete reset” of the world. As a friend of gang members and drill artists (drill being a London form of gangsta rap), he denounces Campbell’s belief in social mobility as “a fantasy upheld by guilty rich people” and has inherited his mother’s view that such middle-class liberalism exists “to delude yourself that you’re doing good, when what you’re doing is making yourself feel good.”

In fact, not long before, Campbell had caused a stir with an essay in The Atlantic accusing his fellow liberals of exactly that:

We participate in the systems that oppress people, we thrive on them, and we think that by going on festive marches and tweeting slogans to our like-minded friends we are somehow cleansed. Welcome to the orgy of white contrition.

For Milo, however, this essay was participating in the same orgy: “You wrote that article two months ago. But have you ever jeopardised what you possess or really questioned your success?”

At first this seems a challenge Campbell is willing to take on. Yet although in theory he may accept that “time’s up for the old ways of being a good person,” in practice the process of embracing new ones will prove distinctly fraught, with Campbell perhaps not so much wanting to change as wanting to want to. Or even just thinking that he should want to want to, while guiltily harboring a middle-aged desire to “hold the world steady.”

As Campbell continues to agonize, Caledonian Road widens out to the many people he and Milo know, becoming by far O’Hagan’s most ambitious novel. His previous fiction, he says, consisted of “chamber-pieces” and “sonatas”; here he’s deploying the full orchestra for “a big, involving, compendious, state-of-the-nation extravaganza” that seeks to emulate Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. Set in 2021–2022, it has some sixty characters from all levels of society, many of them handily involved in state-of-the-nation issues, and with suitably Dickensian degrees of coincidental connectedness.

The brother of Milo’s Polish girlfriend, for example, is a human trafficker, using container trucks to smuggle in workers from mainland Europe for British garment factories and farms that supply the cannabis Milo’s friends smoke. Bankrolling this operation is Yuri Bykov, a twenty-four-year-old Russian, whose father, Aleksandr, is an oligarch spreading his influence (aka cash) through the British ruling class to ensure a blind eye is turned to his money laundering. The sweatshops are, in turn, owned by the retail tycoon William Byre, who owes millions of pounds to Aleksandr and is owed thousands by his old friend Campbell, who borrowed the money to buy his rather splendid home, just off Caledonian Road in North London, a five-minute walk from the small apartment Milo shares with his father.²

The borrowed money—and indeed money generally—is another of Campbell’s guilty secrets. “His chief vanity,” writes O’Hagan, “was that he never wanted to appear to care about money,” a vanity that the ferociously capitalist Byre takes delight in skewering. “Liberals are always interested in money,” he tells Campbell. “They care about it and they care about what it brings, but they reserve the right to disdain that impulse in other people.” (For the record, O’Hagan’s own rather splendid North London home was featured in the January 2022 issue of the UK magazine House and Garden.)

To Milo, the interconnectedness of good liberals, bad Conservatives, and straight-up criminals is confirmation of the rottenness of the system he wants to bring down, and as an accomplished hacker he keeps finding more evidence of the connections. A particularly greedy beneficiary of Russian generosity, he discovers, is the Duke of Kendal, who’s married to the sister of Campbell’s wife, Elizabeth. Bykov Sr.’s other protectors include Lord Haxby, a shadowy Tory fixer, and Lord Scullion, a shadowy Labour one—both with links to Campbell that Milo also unearths.

Having hacked the e-mails and bank accounts of everybody concerned, Milo feeds his findings to Tara Hastings, a journalist for the left-wing online newspaper the Commentator and a young woman with useful connections of her own. Among her Oxford contemporaries were Yuri Bykov; Byre’s son, Zak, an environmentalist whose loathing for his father makes him happy to help with the story; and Jake Hart-Davies, a handsome actor Campbell has hired to pretend to be the author of a self-help book he’s written in the hope of solving his financial troubles, Why Men Weep in Their Cars: How to Get Over It and Fix the World.

But if all of this makes Caledonian Road sound so tangled as to be a slog, that would be entirely misleading. O’Hagan flits between the interlocking worlds with assurance—not least because he appears to have turned himself into an expert on all of them. His London Review of Books essays have always been characterized by the almost pathological depth of their research. His novels, too, have long reflected his belief that “writers of a certain kind [i.e., his]… should put on their shoes and go outside.” And in Caledonian Road, that well-shod research is everywhere. As he told the Glasgow Review of Books:

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 [garment] factories….

This is a book that is full of reported truth.

Of course it’s one—admittedly big—thing to gather all this material, another to turn it into a novel with enough narrative momentum to propel us though more than six hundred pages. Here again, O’Hagan hasn’t set his sights low, clearly (and successfully) aiming to combine an exhilarating intellectual workout with a roistering read. While never uneventful, his previous novels have been quieter, more conventionally literary in tone, and certainly never in any danger of being confused with blockbusters. This one is candidly commercial, even shamelessly crowd-pleasing, in its piling up of Hollywood-style incident.

Visiting a (thoroughly researched) art fair, Campbell praises the Danish painter Carl Holsøe for his Balzacian “marriage of art and melodrama” and for being unafraid “to manage suspense”—which is hard not to read as an author’s apologia, given that the novel contains any number of cliff-hangers, a courtroom drama, a revenge plot, and several murders, by poison, knife, and pillow. When one of the truck drivers involved in human trafficking announces his intention to quit the business soon for a quiet life back in Ireland, you suspect his next trip is unlikely to end well. And you’re right to:

He opened the right-hand rear door and stepped aside.

A thick cloud of vapour poured out of the container and billowed in the air. In the yellow light, he could see them heaped all over the container floor, dozens and dozens of people. Froth around their mouths. Blood. All the images hit him at once: most of the bodies were semi-naked, many of them open-eyed. Wrapped in each other’s arms and absolutely still. Young people. Women.

Along with these powerfully lurid moments, O’Hagan also gives us plenty of comedy, if perhaps at the expense of the book’s easier targets. Campbell’s unexpected sideline as a copywriter for the Monastic fashion agency allows for some gleeful satire of fashion-speak: “The Monastic woman is ready for change: she shows apocalyptic courage in a world crisis.” Jake, the actor, goes “deep with his colon therapist.” The Duke of Kendal’s wife sells such New Age treatments as “the Winter Snail Slime Facial”—although, like several of the novel’s apparently wild conceits, this is a real thing.

Some long-standing O’Hagan fans might, I suppose, be a little disconcerted by his newfound willingness to risk unsubtlety. The characterization, for example, can verge on caricature. At times Bykov Sr. is only a cat-on-the-knee away from being a Bond villain. (“Failure is not allowed in the world I inhabit. Do you understand?”) Even before he goes full Nazi, the duke is unfailingly hissable. While hanging around a local canal, the gang members exchange such sentences as “That ain’t no duck, that’s a moorhen, you doughnut…. It’s totally black, bruv, and it’s got a white face, innit. Check it.” (In the circumstances, Campbell’s remark that “we want stories where everybody is against type, but such stories have no reality” feels like another apologia.)

There’s also a Dickensian tendency to sentimentalize the poorer characters, including the women in the sweatshop, who “seemed to own themselves…. Their hardships appeared not to unsettle their happiness.” In Milo’s case, this is accompanied by what might be termed the Oliver Twist problem. Having laid out the iniquities of an entire social system, Dickens seems to consider them resolved when one boy escapes to middle-class safety. Similarly, O’Hagan gives Milo the happiest of endings: blackmailing the Duke of Kendal so effectively that he has enough money to buy an island containing sixteen houses in the Summer Isles in Scotland, his beloved mother’s favorite place (“I will see you in the Summerlands” were her tear-jerking final words to him), where he, his pregnant girlfriend, and his father will live as part of a commune. Before Milo takes that happy journey to Scotland—a journey that supplies the novel’s other Caledonian Road—he does try to imagine “the stories that never end” on the streets of London. But then he takes “a deep breath, and when he turned away he felt only the breeze and the warmth of the spiritual sun.”

As for Dickensian implausibility, there’s a fair amount of that too. Campbell’s decision to invite the flaky Jake Hart-Davies to pose as the author of his already implausible work Why Men Weep in Their Cars definitely takes the prize here. But his friendship with William Byre is also fairly puzzling—as, more significantly, is his obsession with Milo. O’Hagan’s 2006 novel Be Near Me featured a similar relationship between a middle-aged man (in that case a Catholic priest) and a teenage boy. Like Campbell, Father David—who narrates—has “a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been” and is aware of “the strange power of the young.” In Father David’s story, though, there was the added factor of his long-suppressed gay yearnings. In Campbell’s, you can understand why he finds Milo intriguing but not why he allows the boy to take over his life.

Happily for those long-standing O’Hagan fans, woven through the book are several of his more familiar themes: the appeal and dangers of idealism; the appeal and dangers of drinking heavily; the question of whether you can ever truly escape your childhood, especially if it took place in working-class Scotland and you’re now a middle-class Londoner. Most of his novels could easily have been titled, as his first one was, Our Fathers (1999)—and here, again, are several men who seek to define themselves against their dads.

The pros and cons of digital technology also get another airing. In 2011 O’Hagan took on a curious assignment as the ghostwriter of Julian Assange’s autobiography, spending months with him before the WikiLeaks founder decided he didn’t want the world to know about his life after all. In his long, increasingly bitter essay about the experience, O’Hagan wrote ruefully:

When WikiLeaks began…it felt, to me anyhow…that this might turn out to be the greatest contribution to democracy since the end of the Cold War. A new kind of openness suddenly looked possible: technology might allow people to watch their watchers, at last, and to inspect the secrets being kept, supposedly in our name, and to expose fraud and exploitation.

This is precisely how Campbell sees—or tries to see—Milo’s hacking: “The misinformation that underpins wars will no longer be sustainable; the financial arrangements, the everyday enslavements, the corporate lies, will be denied their secret oxygen.” Where Campbell has more reservations is regarding the attendant death of personal privacy—and the not inconsiderable worry that “technology has destroyed all sense of reason.”

In O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), two lifelong socialists agree that social media has given rise to “the new authoritarians,” who “hate any fact that doesn’t confirm what they already believe to be true…. It’s just woke Thatcherism.” And, ultimately, it’s this herd thinking that Caledonian Road appears to view as the biggest danger of all.

The Commentator, where Tara publishes her exposés, is a fictional sister publication (a twin, I’d suggest) of The Guardian, which, since a change of editor in 2015, has followed the path of self-reinvention that Campbell thinks he should want to go on. Traditionally Britain’s most old-school liberal paper—much chortled at for its “on the one hand, on the other” approach—these days The Guardian has become more Milo-like in its hardline certainties. Likewise, people such as the Commentator’s editor, Rupert Chadley, we’re told, “were Campbell’s friends. They held his opinions, up to a point. But none of these friends could handle being challenged, as if anybody who disagreed with them must be insane.” Faced with a colleague “who boasted he wasn’t a journalist but an activist,” Tara, one of the novel’s unequivocal goodies, wonders whether her coworkers “really did prefer the world as a toxic echo chamber.”³

British readers might detect a potential spot of personal animus here. In June 2018 O’Hagan filled almost an entire issue of the London Review of Books with a 60,000-word piece on the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed seventy-two people, overwhelmingly immigrants or members of ethnic minorities. As he has acknowledged, he’d expected—and wanted—to find a story that fit the approved narrative: a heartless local Tory authority, either indifferent or actively hostile to such groups, had ignored repeated safety warnings and abandoned the hopeless, impoverished victims to their fate. Instead, his customarily painstaking research uncovered a far thornier reality: the Grenfell residents were proud of the satisfying lives they’d built for themselves; before the fire, local activists’ complaints could not have prevented the tragedy, while local Tory councilmembers were not the villains of the piece; and ultimately “a concatenation of failures at the level of industry regulation and building controls, more than anything else, caused the inferno.” Sure enough, O’Hagan and his “fake news” were immediately savaged in The Guardian, a response that he later summed up on a podcast called Talking Politics:

In the climate that we’re in, not only in London or Britain or Western Europe, I think in the world now, things are so partisan…. There’s such a sense…of them and us, that as soon as you announce your interest in certain kinds of facts you’re almost separating yourself off from the people who don’t believe in those facts—that you’re immediately, as it were, even as a journalist who’s looking for impartiality, just looking at evidence and data, that you’re somehow pinning your colors to the mast.

Whether or not Grenfell was on O’Hagan’s mind when he was satirizing the Commentator, Tara’s views on pluralism do reflect his own. As he has said:

When starting out, I got a piece of advice from an editor that I’ve never forgotten. “People have a tendency to believe far too much in what they believe,” she said. “Why not give some airtime to the thing you don’t believe?”

Later he declared, “I don’t want a world where everyone agrees with me, I really don’t.”

So how, you may be wondering, does this championing of pluralism differ from the old-fashioned “good liberalism” that the novel seems to be arguing is overdue for some serious revision? The answer, I’d maintain, is not much—a contradiction that feels less conscious than the deliberate multiplicity of voices designed to make Caledonian Road “different from a lot of novels you see now which are obsessed with one point of view.” On the one hand (as The Guardian might once have said), the novel sets out with some vigor to explode the myth of the “good liberal.” On the other, it’s a novel that only a good liberal could have written.

In Britain over recent years a reliable insult has been “centrist dad,” used to describe or deplore the sort of would-be benign, middle-aged, middle-class man who can’t get quite as worked up about everything as younger people think he should. In the usual way of such things, this insult has now been reclaimed. Writing in the Financial Times last spring (i.e., before Britain elected a classic centrist dad as its new prime minister), the political commentator Robert Shrimsley mounted a particularly stirring defense:

After a period of unfriendly fire directly related to the turmoil of British politics, centrist dads can spring once more from our man caves….

What greater proof could there be that the UK is reclaiming its marbles?…

Centrist dads like to hear both sides of an argument before concluding that we were right in the first place. We are neither radical conservatives nor angry socialists. We like nuance, compromise and incremental reform….

Personally, I’m proud to sound all centrist dad about pretty much everything. Few things strike me as more positive than political moderation and fatherhood.⁴

And, with apologies to O’Hagan, this mightn’t be a bad summary of the politics of Caledonian Road. Or of its comedy—where he often seems to be getting in touch with his inner (or outer) middle-aged man, not just in the stuff about fashionistas and New Age therapy but also in the pen portrait of Campbell’s female head of department at UCL, “a correctness vigilante” who “had searched the universe (and the world’s archives) for evidence of famous writers making sexist remarks in or around the year 1888.”

By the end of the novel, Campbell’s guilt and confusion have led to his comprehensively falling apart. Yet is his wife, Elizabeth, so wrong to try to see this “as the undoing of a decent man, a creative husband and kind father”? You might even argue that, with a change of surname, the closing sentences of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997)—a novel far readier to embrace its own distaste for radicalism—perfectly express what Caledonian Road really thinks about the fate of the equally middle-class Flynns:

Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

You also can’t help noticing that the “real change” that Milo advocates, and that Campbell either tries or pretends to endorse, remains undefined, except in somewhat bumper-sticker form. Two of Milo’s favorite slogans are “People are as free as they want to be” and “The only secret is to begin.” His final message to Campbell is “There’s nothing like the hand of the people for making a new world from what is demolished.” Now and again the book seems not far from saying it would be nice if we all just got along.

In the closing pages, Elizabeth decides that “there are new energies in the world” and that, even if Campbell recovers, their lives might never get back to “normal,” because perhaps “normal was the word we gave to our negligence.” Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that the Flynns would ever forgo their agreeable round of operas, restaurants, and art galleries for, say, a Scottish commune. Or even that they should, merely because the game is theoretically up. “These are,” O’Hagan once observed, “tough times for elitists”—and there’s a clear if unintentional strand in the book that rather wishes they weren’t.

Which takes us all the way back to Campbell’s Atlantic essay, with Caledonian Road proving, if not an “orgy” of white contrition, then a novel that—for all the moral questions O’Hagan invigoratingly raises—never quite gets beyond such contrition. Or, more generously, a novel inadvertently honest enough to suggest that getting beyond it might not be as feasible as O’Hagan’s more radical readers, and maybe O’Hagan himself, would like to think.