Well, I’m glad that’s over. I took up the challenge of Caledonian Road on the advice of a writer I admire tremendously and who shall remain nameless and cast into the darkness where people who recommend painful books live. Caledonian Road goes on for six-hundred-and-forty pages, robbing me of time I could have spent with a more enjoyable book. I thought it might be one of those stories that will suddenly click as the characters step off the page and beseech me to care about them. Didn’t happen. So why is it on my recommended reading list?
Well, as a writer who struggles with sequence structure I have to admire O’Hagan’s plots, and that’s a plural as there is no one driving factor in this book other than the desire to get to the other side. They are many plots, and these form a convoluted pattern, bumping into each other gradually and heading for a spectacular drowning at the end. The Russian oligarchs, British aristos and arty intelligensia, student computer hackers, murdering street gangs, people traffickers and drug runners, journalists, models and DJs, lawyers and corrupt retail moguls, all take turns to spin a story around and about our opening character, Campbell Flynn. He’s a high demand Vermeer scholar (is that a thing?) and has also written a pop psych book called Why Men Weep in Their Cars about the male condition. That’s not on my reading list. Let them.
Flynn introduces us to this whirlpool in which all the characters swim, but each narrator take us along with them on their own spiralling adventures. Luckily there is a Cast of Characters at the start to help keep track of all this, and if you’re a digital reader I would print this out first because without it you are lost. I’ve said before that I’m a fan of character lists, but when I say that I probably have the classics in mind, that is, stories Dickensian enough in scope to require a cast list and where concentrated study is required and rewarded, or an historical story where the characters are real and should be acknowledged. If a story is so complicated you need reminders of the role of each character (Mrs Krupa (Cecylia) – Gosia and Bozydar’s Polish mother, 62), then perhaps the story is too big for the vehicle.
In fact, Caledonian Road feels like it was written to be a TV series – quick gluts of extremism told in fast episodes. I’m sure that will follow and it may make terrific viewing, a star set of larger-than-life characters and the fast, multiple consecutive crises with cliffhangers to pull watchers in. The story, I think, feels written for the international market, and by that I mean the US cultural market, which dominates so much of our lives. Both the story and the telling here are styled in that specific, modern American way with obvious goodies and baddies and topics like corruption, greed, loyalty, money, power. Not a lot of nuance. Well designed surprises. Hyper everything. All just a bit too much.
But Tracy liked it. So.
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