Andrew O’Hagan  [Christina Jansen]

A REAL writer doesn’t reveal the truth,” Campbell Flynn is told by his mother-in-law, the Countess of Paxford.

“He hides it beautifully.”

It should be a warning to Flynn, a public intellectual, working-class Scot made good and the anti-hero of Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel. But instead, it only seems to spur him on in his escalating course of misadventure.

Caledonian Road is a boulder-sized tome with 40 characters and a span of settings and social classes to rival Bleak House. At its centre is Campbell, an art historian, lecturer and occasional fashion critic terrified of losing his relevance. His latest ruse is to employ an actor to take credit for his new self-help book, entitled “Why Men Weep in Their Cars”.

He hopes too that his beguiling student Milo Mangasha will lend him some present-day credibility. But Milo has plans of his own: taking down the web of oligarchs, aristocrats and human traffickers defining power in modern London. Campbell, who always thought he was one of the good guys, will be confined to the most humiliating status of all: collateral damage.

O’Hagan’s own Caledonian Road began the very day after he graduated, when he took the overnight coach from Glasgow to King’s Cross, where he lived for some years.

“King’s Cross never changed between the end of the Second World War and the early 90s, hardly at all,” he says. “And then it changed massively.”

O’Hagan now lives in Primrose Hill, where he co-owns Sam’s Café with the actor Sam Frears. We speak in the busy back room of Glasgow’s famous Steps Bar, jostling for space and earshot with a birthday party and the usual crowd of tradesmen and retirees.

“As a Scot self-supplanted to London, Caledonian Road always had a lot of resonance for me,” he continues. “It’s a road away from home but also possibly back to home, and that’s the sort of thing the novelist takes an interest in.

“Incrementally as you go up the road, you begin to see contrasting Londons. On one side as you go up the road is the expensive communities, Thornhill Square, Barnsbury – white Victorian houses worth millions now. And on the other side of the road you get social housing with all this diversity and differences. And for a novelist that’s sort of manna from the gods.”

The world of this novel is one in which imagined personalities collide constantly with real-world references. O’Hagan’s ear for the patterns of speech is usually incisive, but when he seeks to satirise, he can occasionally take it too far. Flynn’s sister-in-law the Duchess of Kendall – nicknamed “Nighty” – is a little too cartoonish in her embrace of wellness and meditation. The “Commentator” online newspaper is likewise a crude caricature of the Guardian.

“This is a hugely autobiographical novel in some ways,” says O’Hagan. “I’m not making claims to be Campbell Flynn or even in his central dilemma, to even share that. I’m a happier guy than Campbell Flynn, and I don’t have his crisis of self. It amused me, the idea of creating a comic disaster for a man like that, when he writes a self-help book as a way of trying to enrich himself and ends up f***ing destroying his stability.”

Flynn’s tendency to cram an exhausting schedule of appointments is not dissimilar to O’Hagan’s approach to research. “I’d spend a morning in among those oligarchs or Russians or minor royals, and then in the evenings I’d be with drill gangs, or following the cases of young people who’d been accused of assaulting each other. It was a very various London I’d been exposed to over these decades, I wanted to show the deep connectedness of all that.

“I wanted to write the novel that I wish I could read about the way life had turned in north London, just looking at all the institutions from schools, to newspapers, to hospitals, to the social care system, to the leisure life of the young, to the corrupt business associations that have sprung up – all of it. The connectedness, how are they in each others’ lives in so many intimate ways, I just thought that novel has to be written.”

As a journalist now famed for his long-form reports for the London Review of Books, O’Hagan is himself no stranger to controversy. His mammoth 2018 article on the Grenfell Tower fire became a story in itself for saying the press had sought to turn the tragedy “into the story they wanted it to be”, and that the council and its tenant management organisation had been unfairly scapegoated.

But O’Hagan pushes back at any comparison between his role in public life and that of his protagonist. “I’ve never really been an editorialist,” he says. “I’ve written pieces which have caused controversy: you don’t exist as a novelist and a reporter for 25 years without having two or three pieces along the way which cause discussion.

“I’m not afraid of that, but I’ve definitely worked it into the book in one or two instances where this character Campbell Flynn is desperate to participate in the central debates of our time.

“He’s just operating from a panic in his own life, a crisis in his selfhood. He’s trying to work out how it is a man who’s always believed in the right things, who’s espoused the right causes, is suddenly, increasingly, a dead white male.”

• Caledonian Road. By Andrew O’Hagan. Faber, £20.