The Middlemen: A Satire by Christine Brooke-Rose

This is one of Christine Brooke-Rose’s early non-experimental, realist (or realistish) novels, and the final book she published before things started getting literally and formally interesting…

The Middleman: A Satire is a rambunctious (I don’t know what that word means but it sounds right) social satire of the 1960s, surprisingly (for me) in a very similar mode and tone to Trouble With Lichen, the John Wyndham novel I read last week.

The opening premise of this 1961 novel is that a synthetic fabrics manufacturer is having a PR disaster after it’s become apparent that their best-selling fabric is completely flammable and keeps exploding due to a gunpowder being used in its composition.

The novel then follows the PR director of this firm, and several other middle class, higher income, individuals as they navigate a slightly heightened version of late ’50s/early ’60s London, England…

The Middlemen: A Satire explores literary critics (presumably something Brooke-Rose knew about well, as this was her fourth novel), television factual programming, television ad sales, estate agents and property brokers, mortgage lenders and lawyers, psychoanalysts and their patients, secretaries and politicians, novelists and copywriters, directors and builders, travel agents and restauranteurs, corporate bigwigs and greasy salesmen…

It’s a cacophonous plethora of the London encountered by the university-educated class[es] of 70 years ago. And tbh, not much has changed since…

Everyone’s unhappy, property is shockingly expensive and only people with open or secret family wealth seem able to buy a home easily… everyone is nearing their own financial limits at all moments and everyone feels they are an afternoon or a meeting away from either great wealth or complete personal collapse…

Money moves and people move, chasing it…

Far from being the complex, confusing, incredibly original, evocative and formally inventive text of Brooke-Rose’s later work, this is very much a straightforward type of novel, tonally reminiscent of things like Kurt Vonnegut and the less serious texts of Graham Greene…

It has that same kind of ultimately frivolous mocking of the world as it existed then, with that kinda capitalist realist presumption that this is the best of all possible worlds and, thus, the only possible world….

That said, the vitriol and the detail with which Brooke-Rose writes about the financial and economic aspect of housing in London is particularly striking and does seem to have more of a barb to it than the ways in which she gently teases psychoanalysts and PR professionals…

It does seem that, ultimately, the terrible housing situation in London now is not something that is new, or something that has come out of nowhere… Though there have been moments of construction of housing over the many many decades since this book was written, that hasn’t been enough to make a meaningful difference and (of course) meet demand.

The ways in which the housing system is set up, economically, to funnel property and money to those who already have enough/too much of it hasn’t changed at all, with lettings agents, estate agents, brokers etc all meaningfully engaged in extraction and pushing price rises to try and trick everyone involved that property investment creates free money off the back of nothing, whereas in reality what this does is form a hard baseline for huge amounts of continuous inflation…

Anyone who has had anything to do with the property market in London – be that as a renter, a buyer or a seller – unless you’re supremely rich already, will almost certainly have found it not only deeply unpleasant, but also deeply demoralising. (Maybe the rich also find it demoralising, but when you go through the process and end up living someone beautiful proximate to a part of London you like spending time in, then the stress and the tedium and the awkwardness of the whole experience probably feels far less exploitative than it does when you go through all that to end up living in a small room or cramped flat miles away from anywhere and anyone you know…)

Brooke-Rose really does lean into this.

Below is a section from the novel on this topic, and everything included here feels very familiar to the experiences I (and all of my non-affluent peers) have had living long-term in the big city:

Serena for good measure went to see the house agent, and he, a thin bald young man like those one sees in mock Tudor pubs was delighted to act as a more efficient go-between than her solicitor. He rang up the owner, talked to her, dictated the phrase which Serena had brought—it’s very reasonable, he said to her, very reasonable—and hey presto, all was arranged, the owner promised to instruct her solicitors accordingly. Much relieved, and feeling very clever, Serena went home and waited.

She waited three weeks. For the owner’s solicitors would not be so instructed. It was in their client’s interest, they said, not to change the lease which they, thinking of those same interests, had carefully drafted, and so forth, thus delaying the payment of the capital their client badly needed. Letters passed between the two firms of solicitors, repeating the formula required by Inter-Insular, with slightly different trimmings according to whether the formula was being insisted upon or refused. Every now and again Serena received copies of these missives, with a covering letter at a guinea a time, drawing her attention to the enclosed, and finally suggesting that she might perhaps achieve more by approaching the Vendor direct.

…

That seriousness aside, though, The Middlemen: A Satire is a very funny book.

I will end with my favorite joke from from the novel. (A lot of stand-up comedians like to say at the end of their sets “I’ll leave you with this” and, sometimes I’ve seen like four or five acts in a row all day the same phrase and I don’t understand this as even if I’d planned to say that, if I’d seen multiple people say it identically, I’d not say it, but, hey, I’m just kooky. But:) I’ll leave you with this:

The great thing, therefore, was to look artistic, or even intellectual, though naturally no one was, or would have dreamt of wearing what intellectuals actually wore, which was thirty years out of date.