Caledonian Road (eBook)

Andrew O'Hagan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
800 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38138-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'Extraordinary.' Marina Hyde 'An utter joy to read.' Monica Ali 'Majestic.' Independent 'A masterpiece.' John Lanchester 'Addictively enjoyable.' Guardian 'Sensational.' Irish Independent 'Pitch-perfect.' Observer ** Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction ** From the author of Mayflies, an irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel - the story of one man's epic fall from grace. Campbell Flynn - art historian and celebrity pundit - is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for controversy and novelty, he doesn't take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Mangasha, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world. He has experiences and ideas that excite his teacher. He also has a plan. Over the course of an incendiary year a web of secrets and crimes will be revealed, and Campbell Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves. But then, he always knew: when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public.

Andrew O'Hagan is one of his generation's most exciting and serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times and was voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Textauszug

2 Office Hours

He dipped down towards Piccadilly Arcade. He had the time, but he stopped himself from going into Budd to ask about handmade shirts, striding on and pausing at the window of T.M. Lewin in Jermyn Street, as if he were conducting an experiment in parsimony, to match his thoughts. As he sifted through the ties, he knew the truth. Campbell would continue persuading himself that his secret book was a ripe and playful intellectual riposte to the times they were living through, but in fact he’d just needed the money. He lived with his duplicity as if it were an energy. He failed to see the danger in any of it. He had identified a daft and rather current subject with Why Men Weep in Their Cars, a subject he had immediately commodified to his own advantage, hoping it would be the huge bestseller that might relieve him.

‘Do you have it with a thinner stripe?’ he asked the sales assistant in Lewin’s before settling on a spotted tie instead.

Thinking about the book had drawn him to young people, and he was now thinking of the possible usefulness of that actor, Jake Hart-Davies. He almost resolved to go round to Oswald’s club and put the book proposal to him right away, then he thought better of it and continued towards Haymarket.

It was three o’clock. He sat on a bench in Soho Square to smoke a cigarette, across from the mad statue of Charles II by Caius Cibber. Butterflies chased each other round the top of the statue, a pair of holly blues. He loved London in May, when the long, cold winter suddenly vanished. He took out his phone: thirty-three emails. All boring. He put in his earbuds and clicked one of his mindfulness apps. He had four: Calm, Headspace, Buddhify and ThinkUp. It was all nonsense, but he liked nonsense and wasn’t going to abandon it just as he was about to join the ranks of the self-helpful.

Why Men Weep in Their Cars. Out in three months.

It was a good title: a money title, Atticus was right.

He chose ThinkUp – ‘personalised affirmations and motivations daily’ – and listened ten times to a recording of his own voice saying, ‘I am grateful for the good in my life.’ You could place piano music over it, and it was lovely to feel tranquil sitting on a park bench next to a yew tree at the end of spring. In his mind, there stood an image of the perfect vase of yellow tulips and he dwelled on it, so simple and so fresh. But Campbell knew he would never reach those flowers, and he began to know why. Something in his life was off, and he felt that he was steering gradually towards a precipice. Atticus spoke of that Atlantic essay as some sort of cause célèbre and major success, but Campbell knew why he’d written it: because he knew he was a thinker in danger of becoming thoughtless. At fifty-two, he knew himself to be a traitor to the class of his youth and a freak to his own moral understanding. You can’t live your life being celebrated for beautifully preaching what you will never practise, and this was the certainty that had begun Campbell’s trouble. He’d always written rather blithely about goodness, truth and harmony, but hadn’t he, in actual fact, travelled far from these things, and had he any choice now but to find his way back? He knew that hypocrites live on by defending their position against outward reality, but that year, that season, Campbell knew that he could no longer get away with it in his own conscience.

A text from his sister appeared on the screen, so he stopped the app and sat up straight. It was a link to a news website. ‘A powerful committee of MPs has warned that the government is putting national security at risk by allowing kleptocrats and human rights abusers to use the City of London to launder money they are keen to get out of the reach of the Kremlin.’

He called his sister back. ‘I can’t talk for long,’ Moira said. ‘I have to go into the chamber and vote. It’s the new Police Bill.’

‘What’s that all about?’

‘Making provision for the police to arrest more people. Tory nightmare.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Portcullis House. I’m walking. You?’

‘I’m heading into the department. Office hours.’

He was always impressed by Moira’s command of the moral stratosphere. She’d been like that since she was ten, two years younger than him, commanding the forces of municipal possibility from a high-rise in Glasgow, before going on to join the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock. She continued as a QC, still fighting the odd housing case, but was generally preoccupied at Westminster on behalf of her narrowly held constituency in Ayrshire. She was ‘beside herself’, she often said, about City corruption, and felt that Campbell’s social world, his mixing in high company, was an unfortunate by-product of his otherwise terrific marriage into Elizabeth’s aristo family. But Campbell knew she didn’t hold it against him: she liked his writing and his jokes, while doubting his politics. He was liberal in a bohemian sense, and she’d given up trying to recruit him, knowing that only the honours committee could attract her brother to the Palace of Westminster. They shared a wealth of Glasgow patter and deep memories – ‘too deep for tears’, she’d sometimes say. Nobody really understood it, except his sister, and, now and again, Elizabeth, but Campbell was straightforwardly terrified of ever returning to poor conditions. The fact sat very uneasily with his also having an amateur de luxe side the size of the Place des Vosges.

‘Did you see it? Your brother-in-law is for the high jump if he doesn’t watch himself,’ Moira said down the phone. ‘There’s big trouble coming down the pipe.’

‘Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow,’ Campbell said. ‘Elizabeth says he probably had a narcissistic personality disorder in the womb.’

‘Very good. Well, his coat’s on a shoogly nail. Half the people in London – at those old boys’ clubs you like going to, the ones that hate women – had better watch out because the party is over for them.’

‘I applaud your excitement,’ Campbell said. ‘But you know better than I do, Moira. They’ll simply move the party to another venue.’

‘I hope you’re wrang,’ she said.

She sounded ten years old again.

He loved their relationship, the embedded trust.

‘I’m well out of it,’ she said. ‘Serving on that committee would have been a nightmare. They’re also talking about Russian money being hidden in loans to UK retailers.’

His stomach lurched. ‘And William?’

‘Byre? Mentioned,’ Moira said.

He worried about the extent of his old friend’s financial mess. And he worried that it all went still further. He could never say so, but anything involving William exposed a raw nerve in Campbell. He felt involved in his financial story, because he’d borrowed from him, and he loved him, his student brother in ink and wine. Campbell had begun to wonder if his own values might be tainted.

He changed the subject, reaching for something that might allow him to feel he was floating above things again. ‘I saw my agent for lunch. Talked about this new, quick book I’ve done. Mirna sent me a proof copy and we’re whooshing it through.’

‘The Rembrandt book?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Something a bit different. I don’t think Mirna’s in love with it. An odd one – about the state of men.’

‘Holy mackerel,’ she said. ‘A book about men? So … not an art book?’

‘Just for fun,’ he said. ‘Yet it might be the truest thing I’ve ever written.’

Moira hummed in that way of hers, spelling out her doubts.

‘You’re like an artist yourself,’ she said. ‘Artists are always looking for new bits of themselves they can sell.’

He told her he’d bumped into the actor Jake Hart-Davies on Piccadilly. ‘He was with that Bykov kid, the one Angus and Kenzie know.’

‘Oh, shite,’ she said. ‘The company your children keep!’

Campbell paused for a second.

‘Good-looking, Hart-Davies, in that rather too much way. Weren’t his rellies all painted by Augustus John?’

‘I’ve seen his face in magazines.’

‘He was on that show, Aethon’s Curse.’

‘I really have to go, Campbell.’

‘Okay, Moy.’

‘Angus was in touch about the plan for your birthday. I’ll see you then.’

She always said ‘bye’ several times in a row before hanging up.

The spring rain was back, a smirr of the oily past.

He...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.4.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38138-3 / 0571381383
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38138-8 / 9780571381388