★★★★★ HEAT Magazine
The most recent edition of Sydney-based literary magazine, HEAT, is the last under the editorial reign of the sharp-eyed Alexandra Christie. Check out her back catalogue: some highlights include “The New Violence” by Anna Poletti and “Three Poems” by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. Also, don’t miss Ursula Robinson-Shaw's new short story in this one. It is great in the way that vomiting into a wine-glass in a sink is great—kind of horrible, but satisfying.
★★★★ Caledonian Road
The first thing to note about Andrew O'Hagan's latest novel, Caledonian Road, is that it begins with a 59-name character list. That’s how you know you're in for a good time. Our cast includes protagonist Campbell Flynn, 52, art historian and celebrity academic; Milo Mangasha, Flynn's student protégé and hacker; Yuri Bykov, 24, party boy son of a Russian oligarch; Bozydar “Boz” Krupa, head of a car wash and a human trafficking ring; plus various aristocrats, DJs, psychotherapists, weed dealers, batshit landlords, batshit tenants, and one chutney heiress. We are in post-Brexit London, contending with the type of social novel one might hear described as “kaleidoscopic.” Think Dickens with drill rap; “Please sir, I want some Morley's!” Caledonian Road follows the year-long spiral of Flynn, whose skillful pontificating about Vermeer and liberal hypocrisy can't save him from the ravages of middle-age, mounting debts, and the other vicissitudes of life in the heart of an empire well past decline. The book is not a perfect five stars. Milo Mangasha, Flynn’s youthful, working-class, mixed-race, anti-capitalist challenger often seems two-dimensional, a mirage conjured as the perfect category-defying liberal foil. Some of Caledonian Road’s milieu-hopping dialogue is a little clunky. A.J., the woke non-binary model influencer dating Flynn’s daughter, often spouts lines that read to us as oddly stiff (would anyone, let alone a hot lesbian enbie, really call Flynn “Mr Boomerang of Boomtown”? Unlikely). After noting these lapses, it occurred to us that perhaps the dialogue of the Polish human trafficker, or the Countess—members of demographics that we must admit we encounter less regularly than A.J.’s type—might also ring false to readers with those, er, lived experiences. But these are petty quibbles. The real value of this ultimately fun and funny new book is that it has an old-fashioned moralism. With non-punishing levity, O'Hagan stages the Dickensian corruption, brutality, inequality, bonafide slavery, bloody violence and death that undergirds life in global metropolises today, without ever forgetting the pleasures of beautiful interior design. Caledonian Road is perfectly paired with Leonard Joel catalogues, and best read poolside. What’s that? The novel? The ultimate bourgeois form? Oh, no…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Paris End to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.