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.
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