Edinburgh International Book Festival preview: Mayflies author Andrew O'Hagan on his plans for a memoir and adapting Caledonian Road for TV

The word most critics have reached for to describe Caledonian Road is Dickensian, which is fair enough given its enormous social sweep. And although the central thread is the downfall of its central character, a Scottish cultural commentator called Campbell Flynn, it is the sure-footedness of O’Hagan’s portraits of those other worlds, hidden as they are to most of us, that gives the novel both its glitz and much of its fascination.

O’Hagan has taken great care over his research. If he writes well about the upper classes at play it is because he’s taken the trouble to get invited behind the red ropes at Windsor; if his portrait of Bangladeshi sweatshop workers in Leicester sounds credible, it’s because talked to them at length. If his plot involves the possibilities of the internet, it helps that he’s spent six months in an abortive project as Julian Assange’s ghostwriter and has written about bitcoin and identity forging as editor-at-large of the London Review of Books.

O'Hagan once told a friend of mine that he's never felt intimidated in any social setting. "It's true," the man himself tells me. “When I was researching this book, whether in country houses with aristocrats or at the polo at Windsor when the Queen was in attendance or among Russian oligarchs in private members’ clubs in Pall Mall, I never for a second felt outclassed.” I’m intrigued by that. Imposter syndrome and lack of self-confidence is so commonplace that it’s rare to meet someone who has never suffered from it. How did a working-class lad from a council estate in north Ayrshire grow up to be so spectacularly immune?

“It’s one of the mysteries I don’t really have an answer for,” he says. “My mom was a cleaner and my father a joiner but she brought us up [he is the youngest of four boys] more or less on her own. I went to the local comprehensive and found good English teachers like Mrs O’Neill, who took me for classes after school. In those dark Scottish nights after winter we’d be studying well beyond the point where the jannie would be coming down the corridor jangling his ferocious bunch of keys ...

“This might be a future book for me, finding my way back into the past. Because I’m still trying to answer to myself how I got into a position where I could talk about writing, where I could care about it as much as I do. One of the reasons I would want to write a memoir is to reach back and try and find the sources of it all.”

There are strongly autobiographical elements to his award-winning first book, The Missing (1995) and his much-loved 2020 novel Mayflies, but neither offer any clues as to how O’Hagan came to be a writer in the first place. The novel he is currently writing, set in the heatwave summer of 1976, when he was only eight, might not either. If he ever does get round to writing a memoir, I hope it also answers something else that intrigues me. Years ago, when I first interviewed him, he mentioned, among other novels, that he had typed out the whole of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Who, I thought, does that?

“Not coming from a family where people read books,” O’Hagan replies, “a training in writing was about scrutinising the best of them, and to me that meant actually typing the sentences to see how they worked. I could touch type by the age of 16. In fact, I may be the only contemporary Scottish writer with an O-grade in secretarial [studies]!” 

The lives of writers have their own lessons too. Capote, he points out, came all the way from the backwater town of Monroeville, Alabama, to the centre of New York society. O’Hagan’s own journey from Kilwinning to the heart of London’s cultural life started when he won a newspaper’s £50 prize for his reportage in the Strathclyde university’s student newspaper exploring the background of the 1988 Barlinnie prison rooftop protest. He’d gone inside the prison with a Catholic prayer group: as with Caledonian Road, the research was impeccably sourced. 

The day after he graduated from Strathclyde with a starred first in English, he took the bus south to London. It stopped just 100 yards from Caledonian Road, and within a short time he was living in a tenement flat at the back of King’s Cross, “when it was still a place of cobbled streets and gasometers and not the communications hub of Europe that it is now”. 

Having lived there for years, he knows this part of London well. He knows how the gap between rich and poor is still as wide as it was in Dickens’s day, though dizzyingly different and now almost completely unreported. 

Over a decade ago, “when I was trying to decompress from my time working with Julian Assange” he found himself in the National Gallery’s Dutch Golden Age room. “I was looking at all these serene paintings, but at the other end of the gallery this tall, elegant Scottish man with a professorial bearing was arguing with this young black guy with a backpack who was taking him to task for the way he used words like ‘civilisation’ and ‘belonging’.”

This scene, with several added layers of O'Hagan's imagination, sets off Caledonian Road’s clusterbomb of ideas about contemporary culture just as his real-life reportage opens up into the book's savagely accurate satire of modern Britain. 

While the two weeks he’s back in Scotland this month is probably the nearest he has come to stasis for quite a while, he is not finished with Caledonian Road just yet. Will Smith, the man behind the Apple TV+ hit Slow Horses, is already working on a pilot for a series based on the book, for which O’Hagan will be executive producer and will write at least one episode. He’s never yet joined the writers’ room for a TV series, but based on his track record, I'm prepared to bet he’ll be rather brilliant at it.

Andrew O’Hagan is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday 21 August at 1.45pm and 8.30pm, www.edbookfest.co.uk

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