You may inform when an American novelist goes to make use of their guide to say one thing concerning the nation. The hero of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March lets us know on web page one which he’s “an American, Chicago born.” The identical may be stated of postcolonial novelists. Consider Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Youngsters, asserting on the story’s begin that “on the exact prompt of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.” The authors of Nice American Novels and different nationwide counterparts have a tendency to focus on one character who serves as a stand-in for higher nationwide themes and experiences—consider the narrator-protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Lucy Ellmann’s Geese, Newburyport, or V. S. Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas and Alexis Wright’s Trigger Man Metal.
By comparability, British writers take a extra panoramic strategy to writing fiction with nationwide stakes. Since no less than the early Nineteen Eighties, novels reminiscent of Martin Amis’s Cash and London Fields, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, John Lanchester’s Capital, Jonathan Coe’s Center England, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and now Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Street have been learn and obtained in public life as a style now known as the “state-of-the-nation novel.” Reasonably than focus consideration on a single, symbolically freighted protagonist, British state-of-the-nation novels function giant casts of numerous characters related to 1 one other by means of intricate plotting and unlikely coincidences that event ethical soundings and scourings. As they arrive collectively, the person tales of those arrayed characters afford an prolonged event for a chronicling cum evaluation of the nation’s collective life. The remedy is reliably extreme, usually by means of chilly, laborious satire, if at instances additionally a supply of affecting emotion.
In different phrases, British state-of-the-nation novels are written within the lengthy shadow of Charles Dickens, however one by no means says so outright. That will be too apparent and predictable, and likewise would increase the query of whether or not British novelists with pursuits in interrogating the soul of their nation should be drafting off the tactic and mannequin of a legendary forebear greater than 150 years useless.
Caledonian Street, O’Hagan’s seventh work of fiction, appears advantageous with that prospect. The guide is darkly and sometimes brilliantly alive to the present state of Nice Britain, with its infirm King and disarrayed royal household; its roiled nationwide politics, marked most lately by the decisive election of a magisterially bland new Labour prime minister, who’s succeeding a 14-year run of boastful, clownish, incompetent, and eventually slight Conservative predecessors; and its basic malaise concerning the post-Brexit financial system in addition to the state of the health-care system, faculties, and social cohesion.
Compensated for with a bluff nationwide satisfaction, modern Britain can be filled with fear about its slipping prominence on this planet and, on the similar time, its vulnerability to the malign pursuits of Russian oligarchs and the determined hopes of undocumented migrants. Characters from each teams determine importantly in Caledonian Street as a part of a forged of 60-odd individuals, together with dukes and duchesses, lords and women, truck drivers and teenage rappers, environmental activists and laptop hackers, artwork sellers, actors, newspaper columnists, members of Parliament, political and authorized fixers, publishing individuals, multigenerational immigrant households, and offended outdated Englishmen and Englishwomen.
The novel’s primary character, Campbell Flynn, is “tall and sharp at fifty-two,” a “tinderbox in a Savile Row swimsuit.” He’s very happy with issues as of Could 2021, as British life begins to emerge uncertainly if jauntily from the coronavirus pandemic, like a rich outdated girl with unhealthy knees and a few G&Ts in her. Flynn enjoys a plummy place as an in-demand commentator who “makes use of his studying to query every thing from Adam Smith to vampire novels,” following the crucial and industrial success of his accessible but clever biography of Vermeer. He’s turn out to be an everyday at concepts festivals and thought-leader summits, he podcasts for the BBC, he’s simply printed a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic concerning the phenomenon of liberal contrition, and he’s ignoring an invite to put in writing a column for Harper’s.
He has additionally completed a brand new guide concerning the suppressed disaster of male psychological well being, Why Males Weep in Their Vehicles, which he considers essential and likewise a surefire moneymaker. However, uncomfortable with the thought of being related to a guide of questionable mental heft, he doesn’t need to be recognized because the writer. So Flynn publishes it anonymously and hires a good-looking younger actor to play the writer, which backfires when the actor decides to attract on his regressive, laddish intellectualism to carry the guide’s arguments to life. Folks in Flynn’s gossipy elite media and enterprise circles quickly start to find his true relationship to the guide, which threatens each his hopes for lucre and his mental bona fides.
That is distressing. Perpetually residing above his means, he wants the cash in an effort to maintain his life-style going till his aristocratic mother-in-law lastly dies and bequeaths her property (no spoiler alert wanted for what occurs there), and he’s simply been requested to ship a prestigious lecture on the British Museum. In the meantime, his spouse is a classy and gracious psychiatrist whose sister married a duke; his kids are a cerebral lesbian style mannequin and a hyperkinetic globe-trotting DJ. His closest buddies and members of his prolonged household occupy distinguished positions in British society. And he’s particularly grateful for all of this given his pinched Glaswegian upbringing and the fatalistically modest lives of his late mother and father. “That was the scenario” for Flynn, O’Hagan writes, as he’s about to be pushed by means of London to a style home to seek the advice of on names for a brand new fragrance. “That, and the truth that he’d stopped paying his taxes.”
O’Hagan deftly deploys Flynn as a variously realizing, unwitting, and selectively ignorant nexus for modern Britain’s many shifting components and gamers. Flynn’s finest buddy, William Byre, is a scandal-ridden, patrician clothes mogul who laments about his social-justice-warrior son—who “desires to present all my cash away to wind farms and transgenders”—and whose spouse is an arch conservative columnist at a progressive information web site. Past his home difficulties and his more and more public issues with sweatshop sourcing and #MeToo allegations, Byre is in deep debt to Aleksandr Bykov, a Shakespeare-quoting, iron-fisted Russian billionaire who enjoys life in “London, the very best of all laundering-places.” What makes it the very best? The nation’s family-run and public charities, its elite universities, analysis institutes, galleries, and cultural organizations, want some huge cash to maintain issues going correctly. That is granted to them by legitimacy-seeking international oligarchs, who—the novel makes express, in a pointed political barb—function confidently inside authorized rights offered by successive conservative governments. In parallel, these similar getting old, venerable establishments are determined for relevance and public consideration, which is conferred upon them by intellectuals like Flynn.
That the nation’s cultural establishments rely upon swaggering oligarchs and intellectuals is a connection that Flynn’s prize scholar, Milo Mangasha, is fast to see as he will get to know his swish professor and surfaces Flynn’s unacknowledged connections to London’s grimier elites. Milo is a savvy, hardscrabble Ethiopian Irish computer-science grad scholar loyal to a crew of tough buddies. He inherited a radical egalitarianism from his late mom and desires to vary the world by hacking it, which turns into potential after Flynn hires Milo as a researcher for his British Museum speak. As a part of the gig, Milo agrees to show an enthralled Flynn about bitcoin and the darkish net. Milo visits him at his well-appointed residence off a really completely different stretch of the Caledonian Street from the place Milo shares along with his cab-driving widower dad. Earlier than leaving, he steals Flynn’s passport, on a hunch. Flynn is about to fly to Iceland for a nightclub celebration organized by his son; he makes a fast name to a well-placed buddy and acquires a alternative passport with ease, confirming Milo’s sense that even when Flynn isn’t an oligarch, and regardless of his excited, proud plan to assail the British Museum in his speak on the British Museum, he profoundly advantages from the injustices of Britain. Even so, as Milo places it, “he thinks he’s one of many good guys.”
That is amongst O’Hagan’s extra looking out and searing themes: the necessity of Britain’s intelligentsia and native-born elites to contemplate themselves stewards of an important custom of nationwide life, even whereas it’s ever extra propped up by outsiders whose very presence and strategies erode the vaunted British worth of honest play. This dependence is clear in one of many novel’s extra tightly wound storylines, involving the undocumented sweatshop employees making garments for Byre’s enterprise. Byre wants to show a significant revenue in an effort to keep away from Bykov’s probably life-threatening calls for to be paid again. In the meantime, Bykov is the one trafficking these employees into the nation. That is simply a part of Bykov’s enterprise, each shining and underground, which additionally funds medical analysis and floats the artwork market. He’s contracted the human trafficking out to a person named Bozydar, whose mom, upset about her son’s work, declares, “‘We’re good individuals … It pains me to assume in any other case.”
It is a nice transfer on O’Hagan’s half, to shift consideration from the perpetually opining Flynn and assign an incisive declare to an getting old, lower-class, devout-Catholic Polish immigrant about why individuals like Flynn (and herself) ignore their private profit from the injustice and decay of up to date Britain. They’re satisfied that they’re good individuals. How they work and dwell contradicts this. So that they discover methods to keep away from the contradiction.
Certainly, O’Hagan by no means lets Flynn off straightforward, even when this implies he’s delicate on myopic and righteous Milo, whose far-reaching hackery brings down unhealthy actors and reroutes soiled cash to assist idealistic causes, such because the founding of a dubious-sounding individuals’s collective on a distant northern island. After Flynn delivers his blistering mental assault on the vanity of the British Museum for not going through as much as its imperialist roots, he blissfully walks out of the occasion he’s headlining. “Getting into Nice Russell Avenue, he felt a rush of clear air with the scent of roasting chestnuts, and he gave £50 to a homeless man, feeling in that second that he understood and was at one with all of the exploited individuals of the metropolis.” He enjoys this inflated feeling of class-transcending solidarity so long as he ignores one drawback: Mrs. Voyles, the depressing outdated girl renting his basement flat.
Enter Dickens.
Caledonian Street is an outstanding state-of-the-nation novel, the best in a few years, however what lastly issues is its efficacious literary family tree. Predating and transcending classifications of what a nationally minded guide is and isn’t, novels reminiscent of Bleak Home and Our Mutual Good friend established what big-canvas, bold works of up to date fiction contain: balancing humor with ethical criticism, innocence with connivance, secrets and techniques with exposures, whereas additionally creating sudden, story-changing connections between disparate characters excessive and low, wealthy and poor, younger and outdated, native and newcomer.
Dickens invented the very sort of guide that O’Hagan has written. Caledonian Street options all the aforementioned parts and likewise, extra plainly shifting alongside basic Dickensian strains, a chapter-long homicide trial on the Previous Bailey involving a poor younger Black man who by no means had an opportunity, and a aspect story a few simpleminded, fairly younger girl, used and abused by a strong man, who’s finally discovered useless by a crusading journalist. A number of characters die throughout the novel’s 600-plus pages, however as a result of, like Dickens earlier than him, O’Hagan makes you root for them and in some instances in opposition to them, you need to uncover all of this immediately, together with what occurs with decrepit, viper-tongued outdated Mrs. Voyles (even the identify!). She ruins Flynn’s day each time she has the prospect to excoriate him for having fun with the excessive life whereas she suffers within the shabby flat immediately beneath him. Flynn desires to do proper by Mrs. Voyles, sincerely and responsibly, like a very good home-owning city elite, however she gained’t give him the pleasure of it, to his rising frustration, which turns to rage when he has had sufficient and leaves his beautiful home one night time, going “into the Caledonian Street and the approaching darkish.”
This darkness has arrived and is all-pervading in O’Hagan’s convincing imaginative and prescient of up to date Britain. It covers the highly effective and unknown alike. All of them search benefit and alternative in a shadowland that paradoxically sustains and corrupts the majestic thought of Britain. Venerable and very important, subtle and stalwart, dignified and redoubtable, the nation is genuinely interesting not regardless of however due to the truth that it’s turn out to be so appallingly straightforward to control to your personal functions, whether or not you’re born in it, lecturing about it, shopping for into it, shopping for it, or risking your life in a packed, fetid transport container simply to enter it.
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