I’m so sorry - I posted this early by accident and then unpublished it and now people are signing up to read it so I am sending it again without duplicate images. Apologies! It’s because I am starving and trying to do three things at once. Happy Easter! (again).
Years and years ago The Guardian used to have a series about writers’ desks. I found it completely fascinating. I know a lot of novelists, so I thought I’d make a version of it.
Andrew O’Hagan has been writing his huge neo-Dickensian state of the nation novel Caledonian Road on and off for ten years. It’s out on Thursday (June in the US) and has amassed rave reviews. There is a trapped-hornet level of buzz about it. Here’s how it opens:
Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed that his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished. He had secrets and troubles, yet out of the cab window St Paul’s was shining on Ludgate Hill and the angels of London were on his side.
I mean.
The thing about Andrew - we had a child together 20 years ago, so I know him reasonably well - is that he is extremely funny. But he writes about very serious things for the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, so people often assume he is a sombre person. This is not the case, as Caledonian Road demonstrates. It’s him writing in Technicolor.
Anyway: his writing room below, in his own words (such an odd phrase, makes people sound like babies - ‘And he can talk!’).