Reading is an inherently solitary practice – it’s one of the main reasons why I enjoy it so much. But reading is also a largely social practice, with the themes and ideas in a novel becoming the source from which socio-political discourse can be generated.

To say I was excited to receive comp tickets to Andrew O’Hagan’s talk at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, held this year from 6-12 May, would’ve been an understatement. O’Hagan is a three-time Booker Prize nominee who has wrien multiple works of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. His 2020 novel Mayflies was the recipient of The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and his most recent novel Caledonian Road was released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Like many people, I read Mayflies during lockdown, and found its nostalgia and poignancy for the past apropos of the time during which it was released. Siing towards the back of the close-to-capacity Athenaeum Theatre, surrounded by people who I’m sure had had similar experiences with this O’Hagan novel and his many others, I felt the collective sense of wanting to hear what he had to say about his novels, and the state of the world, from which the novels often take inspiration.

O’Hagan had an hour-long conversation with Michael Williams, the current editor of The Monthly and host of the magazine’s podcast Read This. O’Hagan, whose wit and incisiveness is bolstered by his Scoish accent, is the kind of person you can’t help but be endeared to. He began the conversation by discussing his four-year stint as a staff member at the London Review of Books, admiring the growth of the literary magazine from its readership of 9,000 during his time there to over 92,000 today. O’Hagan touched on the first piece he was commissioned by The LRB to write, and how his reporting on the murder of a two-year-old Liverpudlian boy informed his understanding of violence, class and collective cruelty.

He then went on to talk at length about his journalistic writing, and the extent to which it differs from fiction writing. He was clear about the fact that, for him, both involve a

lot of research. O’Hagan made it clear that he never wants to insult a fiction reader’s intelligence by not having goen up close and personal with the subject maer of whatever novel he’s working on (“You have to burn the midnight oil with [your sources],” he says). He also shared a humorous anecdote about false accusations of his being an undercover policeman by a group of young boys he shadowed in a working-class suburb of London for a commissioned piece.

Much of the conversation between Williams and O’Hagan was also dedicated to Caledonian Road, O’Hagan’s newest novel, which he claims was ten years in the making (except for a brief moratorium, during which he penned Mayflies). Williams was quick to point out the noticeable differences between the two works, with Mayflies being a more intimate work that draws from O’Hagan’s own experiences with grief and male friendship. O’Hagan emphasised how personal a work Mayflies is to him, given that its impetus was the death of his close childhood friend from cancer. O’Hagan also says it was a novel that effectively wrote itself, so much so that the first paragraph of the novel as it is printed is the same as it had been when he had first sat down to write it.

Caledonian Road, in contrast, is an epic work of social realism (“I brought all the instruments on stage with me,” O’Hagan said when talking about the writing process) that examines and satirises the sociopolitical climate of post-Brexit London.

O’Hagan conducted a reading of passages from Caledonian Road, miming almost dropping the book as he picked it up (the novel is 608 pages long, in contrast to Mayflies’ 288). The outlandish uerances of the characters featured in the passages were a testament to the satire embedded in the narrative as a whole, and the histrionic manner O’Hagan adopted in his reading garnered uproarious laughter from the audience.

Given the political concerns of the novel, Williams and O’Hagan also talked at length about the current political climate, both in Britain (“In short: Britain’s fucked,” O’Hagan declared) and with regards to the impending US Presidential Election. O’Hagan lamented the fact that many great writers who were known for their political commentary (he name-dropped Joan Didion, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, among

others) weren’t alive to examine and decode the rhetoric of the current political landscape in America.

But despite appearing to harbour a self-aware cynicism about himself and his writing, especially as it pertains to the current zeitgeist (“I’m all for my own obsolescence,” O’Hagan jokes), both in London and beyond, he’s of the belief that today’s young generation are more capable than ever of shaping a beer future. O’Hagan concluded the talk by saying how optimistic he is about the new, diverse voices and perspectives which are now being given greater leverage in the publishing industry, and the role that fiction continues to play in enriching discourse on pertinent issues in today’s society.

So suffice it to say, after leaving O’Hagan’s talk Caledonian Road shot its way to the top of my ‘To Be Read’ book pile, especially given that my copy has a ‘Signed by the Author’ sticker fastened to its cover.