Few things in life are as daunting as the doorstop novel that comes complete with a glossary of the characters featured within. Over the 650 pages of Andrew O’Hagan’s latest, it warns us, we will have 59 different people to keep track of, ranging from gang members and drill rappers and actors and fashionistas to aged Tory peers and people traffickers and teachers and newspaper editors and a sitting tenant from hell.
Not as many characters as, say, Marlon James’s A Brief History Of Seven Killings (75), but still a lot of characters. And the world in which they exist reaches much further than the two-and-a-bit miles of the London street that provides the title here. Caledonian Road has been billed — rather grandly — as a “state of the nation” novel. Meaning of course that it will set out to show that the evil people at the top of society are as evil if not more evil than the evil people at the bottom stabbing their enemies because they’ve strayed into drug territory that is not theirs.
