Slightly later than billed, Andrew O’Hagan enters the packed Main Hall, saying that he hates Heathrow Airport after the hours of delay he’s endured, stationary on the tarmac. He is well-turned out, immaculately dressed. The smartest male author to appear at the festival.
His much-anticipated new book is out, and the audience, perhaps the biggest of the festival, were hoping for some insights into the characters, the research, the writing process. They were not disappointed.
Scots Whay Hae’s own Alasdair Braidwood is in the chair and gets right down to business. Caledonian Road. He asks about the protagonist Campbel Flynn.
Andrew O’Hagan seems just as excited to talk about the book as his audience are to hear about it. Campbell Flynn is a man who appears to have everything, the fancy townhouse in London, a great career, lots of money etc. But something seems to be wrong. He’s slowly imploding from the inside. His life is starting to unravel. One of his problems is Mrs Voyles, a protected tenant who, under 1970s housing legislation (passed at a time when the use value of housing took priority over its exchange value) has the right to stay in his basement flat, at a reasonable rent. Much to his despair.
O’Hagan read from a section of the novel in order to give the audience a flavour of the relationship between the protagonist and his downstairs nuisance. Mrs Voyles is a woman who knows her rights and pulling something of a face, O’Hagan delivers her lines in a higher pitched, old lady-like croak. He maintains this voice throughout the reading.
As he closes the book, Braidwood asks if he has a voice for all his characters. “In my head, yes. After ten years of writing a novel, you go mad with all the voices in your head”. He talks about the claim made by Dickens’ housekeeper that she used to enter the room and he would be pulling faces in the mirror, putting on voices and accents. She even claimed to hear animal noises coming from his writing room on occasion.
Andrew O’Hagan talked about his time spent with aristocracy and the minor royals, in their Polo Clubs and social events. “I loved listening to their ‘daft talk’. The voices would come back to me as soon I sat down to write.” Novel writing and acting are closely related, he says, since they are about inventing and then inhabiting that world of drama.
We segued from voices to geography, as Andrew O’Hagan made the claim that London is like a suburb of Glasgow. Caledonian Road has all walks of life, he says. Town houses and council tenements, side by side. It was an area of social mix, with affluent streets, and less affluent streets, four story townhouses as well as bedsits and student accommodation. “I had a lot of costume changes researching this book”, he says. Charles Booth, the Victorian social reformer mapped the streets, using different colour dots to designate degrees of affluence and deprivation. Over 100 years later, the process of economic reproduction has been so effective, that when you repeat the process today and compare both maps, the colours are almost identical. A person’s position in both physical space and social space are intimately entangled. House prices act as a geo-physical sorting mechanism. Neighbourhood blight represents a long-lasting stain that is almost impossible to remove.
This Dickensian ‘state-of-the-nation’, epic yarn was 10 years in the writing. After taking a year and half out to write Mayflies, O’Hagan was worried he would lose the spark, but the book had even more electric energy when he returned to it. This revitalised enthusiasm gave him the “strength to finally push the boulder over the top of the hill.”
Alasdair Braidwood asked if he had changed the novel a lot during the ten years of writing.
“I had to keep recasting it right up to the end”, he said. “I wanted it to be as contemporary as it could possibly be.”
Thematically, the book is all about the Big Two: money and morality. Andrew O’Hagan said that he wanted a comedic analysis with a beating moral pulse. His ambition for the book was that it connected with people. In this respect, he made an interesting claim that all his other novels up to now have been chamber pieces. Sonatas. Concertos. “This is the full orchestra. I brought all the instruments on stage for this book, even the ones I didn’t know the names of.”
The author expanded on this by talking about the jaw-dropping levels of crime and corruption that take place at the very top of the economic structure in the UK. London has, with the complicity of several governments, been turned into a veritable laundromat for the money of criminal entities, including a large number of Russian oligarchs who buy up paintings, luxury goods, and entire streets in London, with no one asking where the money comes from. From his own fieldwork research, Andrew O’Hagan’s findings have uncovered the true extent to which Russian oligarchs have turned London into their own Casablanca. They would, he said, think nothing of spending a sum equivalent to the average working wage for one year, on a single meal in an exclusive restaurant.
When Alasdair Braidwood, asked if he required legal advice after highlighting these circumstances, Andrew said he had lawyers on speed dial. He stressed the importance of keeping the people and places real. “Detail is important. You have to fashion, embroider, and volumise the life that people know.” Recognition provides a form of comedy. “Billy Connelly was funny, precisely because he talked about real things, and real places”.
Whether you have read Caledonian Road, are reading it, or plan to read it soon, the insights from the author would surely have expanded the enjoyment of anyone’s reading experience. This ‘state of the nation’ satire is an insanely well researched, politically charged, sprawling-epic of a tale, which was 10 long years in the making. You can tell. It was worth it.
