London’s dark underbelly: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed

‘The Cally’s named after an orphanage for kids from Scotland or some shit. Didn’t we learn that in school?’ So says Big Pharma (real name Devan Swaby), drill rapper from the Cally Active gang – one of the many characters populating Andrew O’Hagan’s vast and riveting Caledonian Road. The novel opens with a 59-strong cast list, representative of contemporary London society. At the heart of this web, spanning aristocracy, gangs and trafficked migrants via an oligarch and the middle-classes, are the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn and his student and hacker protégé Milo Mangasha. As with the Cally and its links far beyond the capital, so O’Hagan demonstrates that his characters’ connections reach across the globe. Though it focuses on the north London road of the title, this is a state-of-the-world novel.

Campbell lives adjacent to the gritty Caledonian Road in a multi-million-pound house in Thornhill Square, all ‘shushing trees and contentment’, albeit with a troublesome sitting tenant in the basement. Milo, in part propelled by his mother’s recent death, seeks to ‘upset the system’ by influencing – and hacking – Campbell. Over the course of 2021, we witness Milo’s machinations play out and Campbell fall apart.

O’Hagan is an enthralling guide to the different worlds that exist cheek by jowl in the city, taking us from lunch at the Wolsey to a party at a ‘bando’, where a kid ‘opened a JD Sports with knives in it’; from a penthouse apartment in the new Kings Cross gasholders development (‘a Bauhaus lair in the Kasbah, all modernist rugs and geometric paintings’) to a ‘scabby’ drugs den in nearby Argyle Square, ‘full of smoke and spilled drink and rubbish on the floor and tangled blankets’.