‘The Cally’s named after an orphanage for kids from Scotland or some shit. Didn’t we learn that in school?’ So says Big Pharma (real name Devan Swaby), drill rapper from the Cally Active gang – one of the many characters populating Andrew O’Hagan’s vast and riveting Caledonian Road. The novel opens with a 59-strong cast list, representative of contemporary London society. At the heart of this web, spanning aristocracy, gangs and trafficked migrants via an oligarch and the middle-classes, are the celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn and his student and hacker protégé Milo Mangasha. As with the Cally and its links far beyond the capital, so O’Hagan demonstrates that his characters’ connections reach across the globe. Though it focuses on the north London road of the title, this is a state-of-the-world novel.

Campbell lives adjacent to the gritty Caledonian Road in a multi-million-pound house in Thornhill Square, all ‘shushing trees and contentment’, albeit with a troublesome sitting tenant in the basement. Milo, in part propelled by his mother’s recent death, seeks to ‘upset the system’ by influencing – and hacking – Campbell. Over the course of 2021, we witness Milo’s machinations play out and Campbell fall apart.

O’Hagan is an enthralling guide to  the different worlds that exist cheek by jowl in the city, taking us from lunch at the Wolsey to a party at a ‘bando’, where a kid ‘opened a JD Sports with knives in it’; from a penthouse apartment in the new Kings Cross gasholders development (‘a Bauhaus lair in the Kasbah, all modernist rugs and geometric paintings’) to a ‘scabby’ drugs den in nearby Argyle Square, ‘full of smoke and spilled drink and rubbish on the floor and tangled blankets’.

Milo’s sleuthing makes it clear that there are those who profit from navigating these different environments and those who suffer from the murky connections. Sir William Byre’s fashion label uses sweatshops served by Jakub Padanowski and other trafficked migrants, organised by the ephemeral ‘Zeng’, along with Milo’s girlfriend’s brother, and aided by truckers like Gerry O’Dade who smuggle ‘ambassadors’ across the channel. Some characters undoubtedly have greater crimes to answer for than others, but in this complex horror of a society, no one is free from blame: ‘We’re all guilty of something,’ Milo says. With such a vast cast, it would be near impossible not to find someone who at least partly reflects oneself, thereby making us all complicit. O’Hagan writes with warmth and empathy, and humour abounds; but this unflattering mirror makes for discomfortable. reading

With its twisting plot and engagement with just about every current issue, Caledonian Road feels as bustling and noisy as London itself. Underneath, however, lies a subtle, penetrating interrogation of identity. ‘Self-possession’ is the word that comes to Milo’s mind as he attempts to describe the feeling of entitlement attached to Campbell’s home. Yet we see Campbell literally lose himself at his birthday party, shouting: ‘I’m not here.’ His wife, a therapist, explains to their daughter that he’s haunted by a ‘false self… a made-up self that a person can use as a shield to protect their true self’. Milo, meanwhile, is ‘all about… digital selfhood’, and migrants such as Jakub too easily disappear when stripped of phones, passports and credit cards.

Caledonian Road is unnerving and occasionally devastating, but also hopeful. As Milo writes to Campbell at its close: ‘There’s nothing like the hand of the people for making a new world from what is demolished.’