Andrew O’Hagan’s Big Dickensian Energy

have what it takes to grip to compel? Is this a world where you're happy to give over and be consumed? Can you dip in and out amidst a busy life? You may have seen the new novel Caledonian Road around the Place. This is a book that offers the exact nervous thrill of the epic it weighs in it over six hundred and fifty pages, A state of the nation book, a portrait of a city. This very twenty first century story is wrapped up in an ambitious nineteenth century form.

There's even a cast of characters in the front, like in one of the Russian classics, introducing you to the more than sixty key players who inhabit and drive its sprawling story. Well, I'm happy to say it's an absolute bloody romp and as the latest novel from literary journalist three time Booker nominated much loved author Andrew o'hagen, that's hardly a surprise. I'm Michael Williams and this is read this to show about the books we love and the

stories behind me. Across half a dozen novels, Andrew O'Hagan has made a name for himself as an author of delicacy and grace, novels like Being Near Me or The Missing or twenty twenty's intimate story of male friendship. Mayflies painting the community he comes from in Scotland's West with tenderness and wrye affectionate humor, so his decision to move to a work in such a different register is exciting,

even if it is something of a departure. Caledonian Road follows a man at a turning point, art historian Campbell Flynn who's about to come up against his own downfall. There's Russian oligarchs and minor aristocrats, newspaper columnists and factory workers. It is, in the best sense of the word, a Dickensian world he's created. So it's with Dickens that our conversation begins.

big house and reads Victorian novels. I phone Charles Dickens during that period, and I love just codling up both physically owned metaphor correally with the wonderful sentences of Dickens and his penetrating way of going into human characters of different sorts, all sharing the same oxygen of that particular novel, being in the same weather of that book.

But first and foremost, the thing that stays with me when I think about Dickens, when Ray visit Dickens is the characters, both the big, larger than life ones and often just the little cameos, the walk home characters who absolutely transfix you in a page or two and then a gut on he does.

And I've certainly learned a lot from that is looking at the people who aren't obviously the leaders or the big colorful characters. They have colors that you need to observe. They have sides to their natures that will give you a fruitful sense of the whole story. In the end, I have a character, Missus Boyles, who's sitting tenant, as we say in London, that's to say, a protected tenant living in an otherwise landlorded situation, but they have the right to remain in their room or they're part of

the house. These sitting tenants have become a real kind of symbol of what happened in contemporary London when the property prices went insane and there were a number of new people to literature, including the sitting tenant. I've never really read about in the volume that I wanted to read a London character who has power in the situation that she's in, but also is in a hopeless predicament, can never own the house, can never own their part of it, but is condemned to watch while the landlord

gets richer and richer. And in the ethos of a big place like London now, a Missus Voyles can become not just the fly in the ointment, the troublemaker, but somebody who wields subtle power in that situation, and with you're interested in money and relationships and belonging and power, as I am with Caledonian RhoD, then such a person

becomes kind of fully alive. You know, are we of speaking, are we of thinking the words that she uses, the fact that she's an ex ballei dance and she's always sort of extending her limbs as she stands there talking to people, She's a sort of whole existence to me.

And likewise, he is the villainous landlord, even if we understand him to be something quite different, and he certainly understands himself.

each other's hearts. And what you watch, if you watch closely, is that no matter how bright they are, and no matter how open their marriage can be in so many ways that there are things hidden from each other. And again that's part of the drama of a book like this is trying to unfold. Poor Campbell Flynn, my central character, man in he's fifties, an art historian, appears to have everything. He has the big wedding cake of a house in North London and Islington, which is gained and gained and

gained and value through the last two decades. He has two very very bright children doing interesting things in the world, as you say. He has a fantastic wife, a bright and beautiful woman who has her own pursuits, and he has the career that any art historian, any writer in contemporary life may imagine would be wonderful. But there's something wrong at the center of Campbell Flynn. Something is off in his life, and the drama of the book takes that up. But it's not always the case that he

can see it himself largely he can see it. The people around him, as you've suggested, are the ones who really slowly and incrementally bring the news to the reader about what's off about this guy who should have everything but at some level is absolutely falling apart.

type that he represents. You know, if this liberal, successful, moneyed, white middle aged man is in a moment of crisis, and if it is in part as I think the book suggests, a crisis that comes from a kind of reckoning, a second guessing of what it means to be good and the night of privilege for lack of a betterprise, Is that a reckoning that's over a d I.

his social status. We've lived through the years when men could, and I say men advisedly, men have been able to sidestep the big questions because they're covered in privilege and concealment in all our societies. I'm talking about contemporary London in this book, but it could be many societies in which the cloak of decency and respect stability has been so tightly wrapped around these guys who are privileged that the question are you actually good in your moneyed position

of self satisfaction and fairness and self conscious goodness? Have you ever actually given anything up for people poorer than you? I mean they could ask that of me, they could ask it of any of us. And I think novelists should be in a position to ask these questions, and very often of their targets for these questions are are

not the people who would normally be asked them. We find it easy to criticize people on the right, greedy oligarchs or fantastically self involved industrialists who think of themselves as being separate to society, and media figures who think they're above it all. We find them easy to bring down, and there's plenty of literature that does bring them down. But what about the people who are asking the questions

of them? What happens if you turn the tables and you say to the Campbell Flynns of this world, with their amazing professorships at London Universities, with their regular contributions to The New Yorker, with their appearances on the Today program of the BBC every morning, these respectable, utterly trustworthy voices, we as readers are as creative artists on and say, and what about you? Then? What have you given up

recently to address the great inequalities in our society? Or are you like the people you profess to hate, covered in privilege, concealed if you like, by status. So I think it's right that their time has come around. When I say they, by the way, I mean me. Yeah, my time has come around. A white, middle aged liberal, you know, possibly successful journalist who gets to publish whatever he wants, gets to make announcements on the radio and

in lovely podcasts like this. You know, I think it's time for self questioning to come into my work.

that you wouldn't believe. Hundreds of millions of pounds worth of mediglianies can be bought via London without much checking going on. So if you have an offshore account, as all the oligarchs did, and not only the oligarchs, by the way, minor royals, industrialists, individuals from all over the world flocking to London in the last twenty five years. This deregulated city Tony Blair advertised it as a new

glittering glass and steel deregulated zone. His successor, Gordon Brown, gave out what they called golden visas to industrialists and entrepreneurs from around the world who wanted to park themselves

in London and their fortunes. And then, of course, since then David Cameron and his wild enthusiasm for foreign money and foreign investment, and Boris Johnson, the age of Johnson going beyond satire, beyond ridiculousness, in my opinion, to make welcome oligarchs as proprietors of newspapers in London, in some

cases as members of the House of Lords. This is a society breaking down before our eyes, using hospitality as a kind of means to corrupt the equation, to make the very living economy a sort of living hypocrisy, where people who are poor are getting poorer in people who are rich are getting not only richer but more protected

in their richness while austerity reigns. We've lived through austerity in Britain, through a migrant crisis, through like most other places, a pandemic, and in the middle of all this what we saw governments do was to make the people who had too much more safe in their too muchness, whilst benefits were cut, housing was falling apart, and people who were poorer in that society were in a rougher position.

That is why novelists under the shadow of say Dickens come into play and say, well, let me dramatize this happening. Not in a self serving way, because I in my generation don't come out particularly well from this story. I'm very happy to take that on the chin I devised if you like a mouse trap, in which I'd be one of the people who the cage come down on. But you know, if you're going to criticize society, you should involve yourself. If you're a novelist, in my view.

in South London. But I would argue that the novel has the premium energy subtlety. It can go inside the minds of the people in Lewis Dwellings as well as into the dwellings themselves.

about whether they're entitled to represent things or not. They just use all five senses and the deepest intelligence that they can apply to make these things alive and comical and true in all the ways that they can, and they'll leave it to other people to worry about whether

permission has to be sought. In my opinion, I will never require to ask permission to do something with my brain, which I feel I'm entitled to do, and that's just a human right as far as I'm concerned, and it's a one that I would fight to extend to people of all classes, colors and creeds. But satire is a whole subject in its own, and it depends on this one big thing, a relationship between the classic and the topical,

you know. And I spent as much time on the one half as in the other, working out classically how to create on the page a structure and a movement of voice and tone, dialogue and action that would somehow

bring this comedy to fruition. And at the same time, the other half that goes with classical topical That's why I kept shunting the action through the ten years of this book's writing, closer and closer to the present day, because I wanted the novel that eventually landed in your desk and the desks and on the bookshelves of people all over the world to be as up to the minute as it could be. Classical meets topical. That's the heart of the book.

of their own during that process? Or are you much more methodical than that? No?

started with ten years ago. I'd brought them into company with each other, because as in life, we do share the same oxygen. As it turns out, we can make a many of our differences if we like. But actually there's red blood going through our veins, and something of our communality was always going to be the central engine of this big State of the Nation novel. But have to say, you know, I was surprised again and again how that a well invented character will begin to behave

as themselves. And that happens to writers, not just because of writers. As the writer yourself, you begin to see it happening under your fingers, Michael. You can see as you're pressing the keys that your fingers are going for letters that were not preordained, nothing was set in stones. Suddenly your characters speaking a line that they, I would argue,

in the solidity of their character want to say. And it's a lot of the specific comedy that comes into a book like this comes from characters just beginning to announce themselves as they should do. It's a bit like acting in that way. If you're a good actor, you can learn your lines. But a really great performance and I'll pu China moment is when he begins to speak fully in character. He begins to say things that they're

not on the page. Some of the greatest unscripted scenes in movies like The Godfather Godfather Too, are just when the characters are so immersed, they've traveled so far into what they believe to be the reality and the truth of their character, that they just start to speak as them. And that happens to novelists under their fingertips that your characters do have the power to surprise you, and sometimes

surprise you in mega ways. I've jumped back from my chair once or twice in the writing of this book when I realized that a character had just predicted their own death, had just determined their own fate. Now I look back at the board and I see that the string didn't go that that way. You know they determined it. Now, of course I hocus focus in that, and of course I directed it. I'm the one writing it. But I

can tell you with all sales up. When you're really sailing as a novelist, the characters begin to tell you something you didn't.

And I would say that the not just the young people, some of them aren't particularly young who noticed this, but the fate of Campbell, Flynn and of London, and of many of the major forces in this book is to clear the decks for something truer and I really believe that the order of Milo Mangasha, my young student who questions everything. He's a sort of moral hacker. He's a pest, he's a disruptor, but he really does I think, without spoilers, disrupt and I think that our societies are up for

disruption at the moment as never before. That change doesn't just happen because it's time for a change. Change has to be forced, has to be enacted, has to be invented. We live in the end, not in countries that are settled places. They're just imagined communities. We imagined them into being. Australia doesn't really exist as a thing outside of human

beings imagining it. It was human beings that make Australia, made it in the first place, and continue to remake it through their imagination and the power of their fictive energy. That is an imagined community. So it has to be reimagined by every generation, or every few generations, in order to address the problems of before. And that's what this

novel is about. It's my most optimistic because it sees an arrow going out of the present troubles, out of contemporary Britain into something cleaner, truer, fairer, more representative, and that for me is something I've never been able to do before. Then this is my tenth book, but even in Mayflies, the one just before which was taken up, is a great Clarine call to friendship, into camaraderie, into you know, the common experience of living. Actually, this is the most optimistic.

as money. In this book, and the ways in which different generations fail to talk to one another and fail to understand one another.

I mean any novel that is worth its solved in these times should create the conditions which temporarily I hope don't exist in society for as it were, a multiple analysis of where we are, because we live in very singular minded times in the sense that people who don't agree with each other at the moment are so partisan to their own view. They don't just disagree with the opposition, They want to annihilate the opposition. They want the opposition not to exist as part of their program of existing.

And that describes American politics to me. It describes civilian life in the UK. It describes arguments between generations, creeds, colors. There are arguments which have been allowed to become dehumanized. And I think the novelist has a role in that she can insert herself or himself into the debate at a level too deep for tears, at a level is

Wordsworth said, you know, she's recollection and tranquility. Sometimes we need the tranquility, you know, and society doesn't give that in debate at the moment, there's no room for the tranquil. There's only room for the shouting that angry in the mercile death. When it comes to the opposition's rates and arguments, I like the oppositions arguments in the sense I don't

agree with them. I want to loathe them the same volume as Maine, so that we live in a society of pluralism, you know, And that's what a novel can do. In my view.

this week at the age of ninety two. She's best known for her short stories, which are as good an example of the form as you'll see anywhere. But my tip is go to her novel of interconnected stories, Lives of Girls and Women. It is a classic and I reread it every couple of years because I love it so much. Varlet Alice Munro. You can find Munroe's books and all the others we've mentioned in this episode at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show.

Hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, tell your friends, tell the Internet, tell anyone who listen. You can rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Next week, on Read This, I chat with writer, director, actor artist Miranda Julia about her new novel All Fours.