We’re used to hearing “middlebrow” used as a pejorative, a knock on overly accessible, “normie” content. But as a third path between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” it doesn’t get nearly enough credit. It’s a relief to occasionally watch a film that doesn’t insult or overly challenge our intelligence; accessibility with some standards isn’t always a bad thing.
There is something about an island that stirs the imagination. Or, in any case, it seems to stir mine.
A few years ago, on a trip to the Côte de Granit Rose in Brittany, I walked along seaweed-strewn sands towards one of the many tidal islands dotted along that coastline. As I approached I noticed that on the nearest island, there was a tiny house – a single cottage, all alone – and I felt a familiar prickle running up my spine, the shrinking of the scalp that tells me to pay attention, that there’s something here: the beginning of a story.
“It’s only a racetrack. There’s nothing really to see.” This is what the woman said to me over the phone. I think her underselling the racetrack maybe had to do with my accent, so very not British, and hers so obviously so. It was evident to her that we had come from far away, and this clearly meant wanting to see something more than a racetrack in rural Yorkshire, so she didn’t want to promise more than she could possibly fulfill. But, really, I didn’t want to see something; rather, I wanted to feel something, and I wanted my dad, who had travelled with me, my husband, and my mom, to feel something too. Almost eight decades earlier, this racetrack was the last place my grandfather Malcolm “Mackie” MacLeod had ever stepped foot. This was before he got on a plane the night of January 14, 1945, and then never stepped foot anywhere again. He was a bomber pilot, a flying officer. He flew Lancasters—lumbering behemoths that carried huge payloads of bombs. The planes also had the downside of being nice, big targets in the sky.
“Don’t ever call this work, ok? Ever.” I can't help but think of this line, which Beth Dutton shouts to her husband, Rip Wheeler, in Season 5, Episode 6 of “Yellowstone," America’s most watched television series. They’re on horseback overlooking a golden Montana meadow, as he leads the team of ranch hands on a cattle drive, moving hundreds of animals across the mountain.
Cut to me, suddenly in their shoes. It’s raining and I’m on horseback, wearing a black, floor-length slicker while gently driving annoyed cattle (and their precious calves) to their pens, in a Montana valley surrounded by mountains. I tilt my head to the clouded sky, smile, and take a deep breath. I'm doing it.
Sometimes, obsession is sparked by one defining moment. An all-consuming tragedy can mutilate a person’s mind, flaying it layer by layer until only fixation remains. Obsession can be a nest. Rotting twigs of unreciprocated love and fear as its foundation. Nick Cutter burrows into the human psyche and concocts unfathomable horror in his new book, The Queen.
“Those Opulent Days” is subtitled “a mystery,” which is odd as the one at the book’s center is useful for driving its plot forward but doesn’t really feel like the point. Instead, the novel’s main interest seems to be its character studies and historical setting. 1920s Vietnam is lushly and lovingly described, and its characters vividly realized. Rather than being a mystery, the novel has far more in common with noir: It examines the dark griminess that is part and parcel of the spectrum of humanity.
Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse, and in Morning and Evening, his newly republished 2000 novella (elegantly translated by Damion Searls), we follow one person’s passage from womb to Earth, and from Earth to the afterlife, in a near seamless progression. This, then, is not a novel that describes a life; it is a fable about the very beginning and end of a life – a metaphysical ghost story.