Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing the police in different voices.
He just seems to know so much stuff – not only about architecture and food (his main stock-in-trade as a journalist and broadcaster over the years) but about bog burials, National Service slang, café culture in Zurich, Anthony Powell, the ‘chavscum’ debate of the early 2000s, the last days of French Algeria and much more. And he has a nice way of slipping small doses of reality in with the pyrotechnics, a bit like Picasso did using the day’s newspapers in a collage. A long list of absurd and palpably made-up people might include David Starkey or Radiohead; Maurice Bowra’s disparaging comments about Guy Burgess’s personal hygiene are retrofitted to apply to a character in the novel.
This is all very well – but what is Empty Wigs about? It’s about 1,000 pages long is one answer. (Reading it for review left me in need of a long stay in a darkened room.) Another is that it’s about what all Meades’s fiction is about, more or less: Nazis, killer dogs, Belgium, the south Hampshire littoral and weird sex – there being apparently no other kind of sex in his view. The book consists of 19 overlapping stories. If there’s an overarching plot, it has to do with a family scattered through time and space: the raven-haired Doggs and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on. These range from a country-house eugenics experiment in Shropshire to the grave of Heinrich Himmler on Lüneburg Heath to the travails of a pederastically inclined Edwardian artist to a rock star forced to smuggle drugs after a very Meadsian double-bill of a wine tour followed by – yes – weird sex.
If there is a moral to the tale it is that chickens have a propensity to come home to roost. Character may or may not be destiny, but you can’t escape your genes. The way in which members of the Doggs family crop up in the unlikeliest places – a walk-on in one section may land the lead in another – is echoed in imagery and in little repetitions of language – the title itself, an obscure and quite possibly fictitious quotation; turns of phrase such as ‘common as cruet’. There are even overlaps with Meades’s 1993 novel Pompey, a comparative stripling at 472 pages: a cross on Portsdown Hill; the irredentist terror group the OAS; a killer virus known as HoTLovE.
The book is about what all Meades’s fiction is about, more or less: Nazis, killer dogs, Belgium and weird sex
Given its girth, Empty Wigs is remarkably tightly structured. It is, however, unrelenting. It is a déformation professionelle of the restaurant critic (an office Meades discharged at the Times in the 1980s and 1990s) to treat language in the way an ambitious but immature chef might his ingredients. That is, to let no pudding go under-egged; to cook not for a community of neighbours and loved ones but for any passing Michelin inspector – in short, to show off. The various protagonists of Empty Wigs don’t sound the same; but they’ve all been ramped up to a similar degree. The novel is as texturally and emotionally clotted as it is narratively and stylistically expansive.
It is also fairly bracing in places. Meades’s disparaging view of Islam, parodied here as Ramalama, surely stems less from a dislike of brown people per se (he’s an equal-opportunity misanthrope) than a belief that secularism is the keystone of post-revolutionary France. But it’s interesting that he doesn’t use the Algerian episode as a springboard to explore the roots of the Front National in the pieds noirs who returned to the motherland after 1962. Perhaps as a French resident he felt that a visit from le goon squad was more of a clear and present danger than a fatwa. But to say, for example, that a people reeks of mutton fat when they haven’t been near a steppe for centuries is racism of the crudest kind. Of course, Meades isn’t saying that – but his characters say it, and things like it, rather a lot.
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