The accidental profundity of the middlebrow

When did we stop thinking about cultural output in terms of highbrow, lowbrow and — most delicious of all — middlebrow? In the striving ‘80s and ‘90s, when class in the UK was explicitly understood as malleable, ‘middlebrow’ was king. Between ‘lowbrow’ (Top Gun, Blind Date, Wilbur Smith thrillers) and ‘highbrow’ (Peter Greenaway, GBH, Martin Amis), there were the middlebrow giants: The Crying Game, Inspector Morse, Sebastian Faulks.

I’ve been thinking about ‘middlebrow’ recently because I have fallen into the novels of William Boyd, who towers over the British middlebrow like a genial Colossus. My introduction to Boyd was Gabriel’s Moon, a 2024 novel about an accidental spy in Swinging London. (Espionage thrillers, especially British ones, are deeply middlebrow; period settings are another tell.) The titular Gabriel Dax makes a decent living through travel writing (there’s a vanished biography for you). On a work visit to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) he stumbles into an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the real-life first Prime Minister of the Congolese Republic and thorn in the side of the CIA. Lumumba is assassinated days later, and Gabriel suddenly finds that his interview transcript is of interest to MI6. From there, we’re off into a kinetically satisfying slide through ‘60s London bedsits, Spanish bohos and hard, drunk American men with guns.

But instead of immediately getting himself killed, Gabriel proves to be oddly adept. He is clever and funny and self-aware, generous and spontaneous and robust and independent; despite his backstory of deep childhood trauma, his personality is almost epically functional. He has extraordinarily healthy boundaries, and a genuine and open-minded interest in the people around him. There is a lot of bemused self-questioning, as you would expect from someone who is accidentally spying for MI6: ‘What in God’s name have I got myself into?’, ‘What the hell was going on?’ But none of this translates into anything approaching genuine unease. (One of the reasons that Le Carré’s later novels are highbrow rather than middlebrow is that everything about them is deeply queasy.)

If you had to sum up Gabriel’s Moon in one word, that word would be ‘congenial’. Reading a Boyd novel is like spending the day at a sprawling house filled with well-behaved children, nice dogs and comfortable sofas; the food is hearty, everyone is slightly (but not messily) drunk, the conversation never lags, and nobody is judging your shoes. Boyd was born in Accra to a doctor and a teacher; he attended prep school and then Gordonstoun; he went to university at Nice, Glasgow and Oxford (which seems like at least one university too many); he has houses in Chelsea and the Dordogne. From this restlessly cosmopolitan background of considerable privilege, he spins rollicking tales of enormous charm. His protagonists — always posh, always male, always English — surface at various points throughout the twentieth century, in various parts of the globe; they become tangled up in world events; they experience bizarre coincidences; they narrowly escape danger.

At every single point, even when they’re behaving quite badly, you’d be very happy to go for a pint with them. Their personalities are so secure, so open-handed, that their every move feels like a genuine offer of friendship or connection. (In the words of the Soviet prosecutor Ignatov in Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, another totemic middlebrow novel, charm is ‘the final aim of the leisure class’.) The story of Lorraine, Dax’s working class girlfriend, seems to illustrate this conundrum: she mistakes Gabriel’s easy, generous affection for something deeper. When she eventually dumps him, her explanation contains what must be deliberate shades of Pulp’s ‘Common People’, the anthem of the economically insecure and their difficult dealings with the posh: ‘Her hair was considerably shorter… “I needed a job”... There was a flat above the shop, she said.’ Little ‘Easter eggs’ like this, which allow the reader to feel clever for a couple of minutes, are deeply middlebrow.

The middlebrow category still exists, and is still wildly successful; we just don’t tend to call it ‘middlebrow’ any more. The term seems to have undergone a process of pejoration, in which the supposedly unvalorous qualities of the denoted items become a semantic smear on the word itself. Middlebrow is popular, middlebrow is easily accessed, middlebrow disappears after impact; who, these days, reads Captain Corelli’s Mandolin? For the striving, insecure middles, the middlebrow hits of yesteryear are a stain on the bookshelf; if you can emancipate yourself from the cringe, you will find a wonderfully easeful trove of middlebrow on the shelves of charity shops in well-to-do areas.

The cultural flinch that put paid to middlebrow is today apparent in the word ‘trashy’: like trash, having some of the qualities of trash, but somehow — through the magical application of the consumer’s awareness — not actually trash. Middlebrow is, of course, a variety of trash: it’s trash with a middle-class consciousness, trash with less vulgarity; it has a wider vocabulary, better taste in soft furnishings, and cleaner, less upsetting politics. I’m not saying this to be rude; ‘trash’ is not a synonym for ‘shit’. It takes rare qualities to hit the trash sweet spot of entertainment, ease of access, and evanescence (the quality of impermanence, not the 2010s rock band). If I were able to write a wildly popular book, I would of course be doing so right now; the truth is that I can’t. In order to be perceptibly popular, trash must be accessible; it must be the kind of thing you can watch with half an eye, or read with half a brain. Trash is never difficult or obscure; its meaning, to the extent that it has a meaning at all, is entirely obvious. You might want to read or watch it a second time, but you won’t need to. Underlying all of this is the question of the creator’s intent: trash is not created for the purpose of effecting change, either within the artform or in the wider world. It does not aspire to longlasting impact.

In middlebrow novels, the historical settings often work towards political inertia. I have a great fondness for Faulks’s novel Charlotte Gray, but it’s hardly a realistic portrait of SOE’s successes and failures in Occupied Europe. Few people outside the Congolese diaspora now have a very firm idea about who Patrice Lumumba was, and every single person who has agrees that his assassination was a shameful geopolitical crime. There is no tension in Boyd’s disinterment of the case; there is no struggle. As Boyd himself has said: ‘My vision of the world is that it’s absurd and stupid and makes no sense, and attempts to make it make sense are doomed to failure.’

But while the producers of trash don’t explicitly aim for longlasting impact, they can end up achieving it anyway. The political bones of Jilly Cooper, for example, have emerged over time. I have spent decades nursing a prejudice against Cooper’s novels; the covers (a brute combination of proprietary sexuality and horse tack) make me want to punch something, and I couldn’t expunge the awareness that Cooper was a self-confessed admirer of Margaret Thatcher. I was both sentient and politically aligned in the ‘80s, and I had quite enough real-life experience of actually existing Thatcherites in the home counties.

Then, the 2024 Disney Plus dramatisation of Rivals turned into a massive hit, and it became apparent that lots of women — women I like and/or admire, women who are absolutely on the left — really love both the books and the adaptation. It’s significant, I think, that most of these women are at least ten years younger than I am; they weren’t there, or — at least — their tear-stained mother hadn’t pinned a wilting red rose to their school blazer on the morning after the 1987 General Election, around which the second series of Rivals revolves. (This makes my mother sound hysterical. She wasn’t, but she did take the 1987 election very hard.) They didn’t see it happen the first time around, as tragedy; they can consume Cooper happily as farce, and perhaps as a highly coloured piece of dramatised history. In choosing a contemporary setting for her throwaway romps, Cooper perhaps inadvertently authored a political document, a sympathetic and absorbing explanation of the attractions of Thatcherism, one that has real explanatory power. Her villains are rotters and her heroines are gutsy, but they all exist together within the material structures of a social and economic revolution.

Boyd’s most famous novel is Any Human Heart, a cradle-to-grave narrative of the protagonist Logan Mountstuart in the form of an intimate journal. Mountstuart is admirably buoyant and open minded, but the emphasis on privacy and secrets afforded by the diary device enables us to see his selfishness and bitterness, and worse. Any Human Heart is less congenial than Gabriel’s Moon, but there is something radical in the way Boyd marries Mountstuart’s public face of easy, charming privilege to his private shards of bald nastiness. As The Guardian noted in its review, ‘The common factor [in journals is] the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth.’ Like the radical self-acceptance practised by Boyd’s characters, trash doesn’t care about the pursed-lipped judgements of the intellectually anxious: it just wants to be. And sometimes, in capturing the attention of millions of people and bringing them to one focal point, it cannot help becoming profound.

---

For more on the various cultural brows, high, low and in between (including some charts, which is very middlebrow):