Sweeping ... A novel this broad has to move quickly, and depend on speech to deliver key details. O’Hagan’s dialogue can feel stilted and unnatural ... A rich, moving attempt to listen to the swell of human life, but O’Hagan occasionally falls into the same trap as his protagonist.
While O’Hagan’s novel has funny bits, it is fundamentally glum, befitting the time and place of its writing ... Intended as social criticism, it somewhat falls down as fiction. Snappy dialogue can’t rescue a number of characters from sounding like types.
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 ... This is rollicking fiction lifted from on-the-ground fact, the novel rekitted as a journalistic first draft of history ... O’Hagan falters slightly when he’s running alongside London’s youth, with their fist bumps and shout-outs and full-on happening parties. Elsewhere, his prose is nimble, lively and sure-footed.
Darkly and often brilliantly alive to the current state of Great Britain ... O’Hagan deftly deploys Flynn as a variously knowing, unwitting, and selectively ignorant nexus for contemporary Britain’s many moving parts and players ... Caledonian Road is a superb state-of-the-nation novel, the finest in many years, but what finally matters is its efficacious literary genealogy.
Feels as near an authentic slice of contemporary London life as any packed tube carriage ... This is no simple morality tale, however. In delineating Flynn’s fall, the light of O’Hagan’s attention falls on each of his characters equally ... This book is a departure from that more personal focus, in that he brings into play all of his reporter’s eye for detail and feel for critical ironies. The result is a tragicomedy of manners that has a pitch-perfect grasp of the icy snobberies of Garsington Opera and the patois of drill rappers; a frontline dispatch from the trenches of culture wars and a much-needed, vividly enjoyable broadside to them.
Halfway through Caledonian Road the deaths start to occur and the tone, so far lightly satirical, with the odd epigrammatic flourish, darkens in turn ... Wildly readable, brimming with energy and filled with enjoyable contemporary detail. Brash, prating characters stalk its pages, demanding attention and understanding; yet, in Andrew O’Hagan’s redistributive narrative justice, the most heartfelt, and heart-rending, moments tend to involve those whose fate is to lurk on the periphery.
Hefty ... Smartly plotted, eminently readable and often amusing ... O’Hagan constructs a topical novel full of sharp observations and incorporating an array of representative figures.
Vast and riveting ... This is a state-of-the-world novel ... O’Hagan is an enthralling guide to the different worlds that exist cheek by jowl in the city ... Feels as bustling and noisy as London itself. Underneath, however, lies a subtle, penetrating interrogation of identity ... Unnerving and occasionally devastating, but also hopeful.
There’s a certain playfulness to O’Hagan’s braiding together of these narrative threads as they twist and turn through the streets of the capital ... O’Hagan can be very witty, most deliciously when it comes to strained relations between the generations ... But for all these moments, I found Caledonian Road a rather brittle, bombastic book. O’Hagan’s creations feel less like characters and more like caricatures ... As for reading the novel here and now, though, I admired the endeavour, but I can’t honestly say I enjoyed the experience.
A clever premise for a story. Or would be, if O’Hagan had concentrated on it ... An interesting idea for a caper. Or would be, if O’Hagan had concentrated on it ... The strands feel more like a series of loosely-linked narratives than a cohesive whole ... That said, there are plenty of terrific moments ... It all adds up to a bit of a muddle, but an enjoyable muddle.
The range of phenomena Mr. O’Hagan documents is truly impressive. Campbell’s slow crackup provides a narrative string for all these vivid beads. But that string is awfully slack, with a soap-operatic sense of perpetually deferred payoff ... This would be less noticeable if the prose had the verve of Mr. O’Hagan’s best ... The third-person narration of Caledonian Road, by contrast, feels caught at an awkward middle distance, often wanly functional or summary.
Ambitious ... It’s frequently entertaining and never boring ... The breakneck pace, as well as limiting character depth, gives little breathing space, so events come too fast. Significant deaths feel rushed and lead to odd tonal shifts ... One of those books that’s just too much — but also not quite enough.
That character glossary, in other words, ultimately feels unnecessary: many of those many people we encounter feeling briskly drawn, talking in sentences that make it obvious who they are and where they come from, present solely to drive the plot forward. But all that said, this is still a hugely enjoyable ride: one that zips along with all kinds of twists and turns, finding ingenious links between its characters along the way. The energy never lets up, not even for a single paragraph. It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that its TV rights were long ago snapped up — John Renck of Chernobyl fame will be directing — because this is a book that instantly feels like a box set waiting to happen.
The tone is, on the whole, satirical, and the main target of O’Hagan’s satire the cowardice and hypocrisy of the liberal middle-classes. This hypocrisy is exposed in his novel by characters who loathe liberals for quite different reasons: the rabble-rousing tabloid columnist gets as many good lines at the liberals’ expense as do the bolshy teenagers who can see through the sanctimony O’Hagan spares his readers any overly 'fine' writing. This is a book seeking the approval of readers rather than critics, and its topical focus means there are a few too many people who talk in the style of anonymous commentators opining on the politics of the day. But there are quieter, more reflective moments ... Readers will have to decide for themselves whether they can stand to spend quite so many pages in the company of characters who range from the humanly flawed to the irredeemably odious, with a distinct bias in favour of the latter. While there are moments of hopefulness, little acts of decency, moments when characters come to a painful self-knowledge, there is a good deal of venality to wade through first, and a fair amount of nastiness. Perhaps, O’Hagan might say, a state-of-the-nation novel can’t afford to make the state of the nation seem nicer than it is.
In this Jonathan Franzenesque tale (this is a social realist novel with a moral core), O’Hagan explores the vacuous attempts of the British aristocracy to maintain their wealth and prestige at the expense of others in this kaleidoscopic exploration of post-pandemic and post-Brexit Britain.
O’Hagan is at his best in the high society scenes ... Unfortunately, the scenes involving Mangasha’s young Black male friends are less convincing. Still, O’Hagan handles the many narrative strands with aplomb. Readers with a taste for the Dickensian will find much to admire.
