The city itself is the star of all great London novels, and plays whatever role is required by the tale or the times. It was a semi-sentient organism in Dickens’s Bleak House, wrapped in fog and thick with mud. It was rancorous and gone to seed in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square; gauche and adventurous in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids cast it as a city of the blind, prowled by carnivorous walking plants. That probably remains fictional London’s lowest ebb. But at times, for dark stretches, Andrew O’Hagan’s seventh novel runs it close.
This is in no way to suggest that Caledonian Road is a drag. Quite the opposite: it’s an addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider’s grasp on the nuances of high culture. But this bustling, boisterous burlesque has the sour undertow of despair. The London that emerges from its 600-odd pages resembles a vast, rotting carcass picked over by carrion. The people live off it, not in it, and seem to be intent on stripping the place to the bone.
