Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not

 

London bawling

Andrew O’Hagan makes an epic failure
of his made-for-TV English saga

Greg Klein | June 6, 2025

 

 

London, as one Caledonian Road source notes, is a city “levitating on a sea of dirty money.” And levitating with their city, as this novel never tires of telling us, are ever-so-exalted wealthy white people contrasting with tragically underprivileged non-whites.

But for the most part the city, the entire country, consists of celebs, white celebs. Almost everybody’s famous here, not just the actors, models, influencers and other personalities, but the art critics, environmental activists, peers, pundits, business execs, DJs, photographers, the people who design their homes, clothing and other status symbols, the status symbols themselves, the paintings, furniture, housewares, food, wine, scent, even fucking hairspray, just about all the fucking white people and all their fucking stuff is so fucking famous.

 

The author’s fascination with high-status consumer items, apparel,
cuisine and other lifestyle shibboleths suggests a social-climbing impulse.

 

Not so with the poor little black people, of course. That pitiful, pitiful lot, plus one or two Irish and Scots (the author is Irish by way of Scotland), struggle to uphold their dignity in a country levitating on a sea of injustice. Oh yes, a few upper-middle-class white women (an MP and a journalist of course, also a therapist) object to injustice.

If that sounds trite, that’s Caledonian Road, a cliched Hollywood-style story disguised as a clever London epic. The cleverness quickly becomes glib while the characters remain shallow.

The novel centres on Campbell Flynn, a middle-aged upper-middle-class white celebrity intellectual with money problems who’s come to doubt his work, his self-worth and eventually all of Western culture. An interesting sub-plot involves Campbell’s anonymously written self-help book and the actor hired to pose as its author.

But for the most part, the story plods. Potentially good scenes fall flat, even when Campbell, confused as he is, tells off assorted literati, glitterati and shitterati. Momentous events pass unmomentously.

Campbell initially seems interesting. He begins as an apparently respected thinker credited with having “divined some of creativity’s secrets.” Even in decline he has moments of insight, although by then atypical. But as his descent steepens he becomes progressively trite, attempting verbal demolition of the British Museum and everything it stands for; trying to deconstruct and demolish all Western art and meaning; credulously finding faith in the Internet and denouncing Coca-Cola as racist. Although not without wit, Campbell’s personal, ethical, aesthetic and philosophical muddling (recognized by his therapist wife as “moral dementia”) really gets tiresome, especially when he adopts trite new-to-him “progressive” beliefs.

 

A detail from Jan Both’s Landscape with St. Philip Baptizing the Eunuch:
Stereotypically feeling personal, racial and cultural shame, Campbell
“bristled at the sight of the stooped man of colour being blessed by the
white man in robes.”

 

They come from a student who quickly becomes his mentor. And no wonder. Milo is black (actually half Irish and half Ethiopian) and therefore of unimpeachable integrity, not to mention being a stupendous computer genius who’s a phenomenally quick study when exposed to fine art, a devastatingly insightful observer of human nature, a philosopher of diamond-in-the-rough profundity and an innovative social activist of unassailable selflessness.

Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood.

Class connects the characters, social strata separates them. The intertwined upper level includes Campbell’s secretly criminal friend, a corrupt duke, a Russian oligarch, his playboy son, a celebrity climate change warrior, a wealthy DJ, a flake actor and so on. Of lesser importance are people like a Polish criminal businessman, a Romanian enforcer and the Irish-therefore-innocent truck drivers who smuggle drugs and people. Farther down yet are those people, mentioned just briefly: Vietnamese, Bangladeshis and others, struggling valiantly for a new life in a country reeking of corruption and bigotry. Others include a Scottish junkie and a few Polish homosexuals. At the very bottom, of course, are the blacks, gasping for justice in this sea of iniquity.

Along with the rich and famous whites, they’re the people who matter in O’Hagan’s little world.

Missing are real people, fictional characters who might believably inhabit England or otherwise strike a chord with readers. Some of them could even be real white people who, contrary to Hollywood pretense, not only lack money and status but struggle to get by while fighting all kinds of adversity.

Instead we get ideal Hollywood types from an author feted for supposedly chronicling these times. Meanwhile the quest continues for writers who do find in these times inspiration for good fiction.

 

Of course.