Jonathan Meades was once a familiar face on television, especially on the BBC, in documentaries about architecture and the built environments of Britain.
Sean Sheehan
He has long been a journalist and a writer of fiction so the publication of “Empty wigs”, a collection of short stories, should not come as a surprise. This is not to say that some readers will not find it fiction of a provocative kind.
There are less than twenty stories but this is a big book of almost a thousand pages and the first story takes up nearly a hundred of them. It is set in Algeria at the end of the country’s war of independence against the French (1954-1962) and the willingness of Meades to give voice to a deranged, murderous Islamaphobe is slightly alarming until taken as a warning about the vile nature of racist nationalism.
The author’s sense of humour, deliberately shocking, is an acquired taste and it is best not to quote here a paragraph – funny but in a disgusting way – where a character outlines his father’s medical interests. As an example of the author’s malign humour, the Catholic mass is mischievously described as “part cannibalistic gluttony, part homoerotic sadism”.
As with Anthony Burgess, a British writer of the generation before the author, your vocabulary will be enlarged in the course of reading. When the eyes of a character are described as ‘liquid zircon’ I found myself reaching for a dictionary and some of the sexual slang is a sheer delight.
There is an excess to the writing, a compulsion to exaggerate and go over the top but it also draws on a vast treasure chest of arcane knowledge and besides using a dictionary there will be recourse to internet searches just to verify that, yes, he does know what he is saying about a particular topic.
Beneath it all is a deep revulsion at the state of the world and rage at the stupid, empty-headed people –hence the book’s title– who tolerate psychopathic politicians and careerists who make their living by cultivating the art of lying. When a character in one of the stories goes down to a beach “the sight of the breakers glinting released powerful emotions in me, not to mention a fond longing for waves as high as mountains destroying cities and obliterating life”.
The descriptions of wars and atrocities and violence in general are viscerally unpleasant and the dazzling exuberance that goes in to evoking death and destruction becomes the author’s safety net: he either goes insane at the savage insanity of it all or writes about it with enthusiasm as a form of self-protection.
Meades is an enemy of the anodyne and the politically correct. His writing is a tour de force and worthy of being highly recommended – but only if you are not fainthearted or easily offended.
“Empty wigs”, by Jonathan Meades, is published by Unbound.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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