Empty Wigs

by Jonathan Meades

Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great literary writers of our age.

It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments, Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject.

Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick changing moods, Empty Wigs is a late modern masterpiece and a return to the novel’s origins.

Genres: Fiction

1008 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 2025

About the author

Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is a writer, food journalist, essayist and film-maker. Meades has written and performed in more than 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects. His books include three works of fiction and several anthologies.
Meades is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of the British Humanist Association.
Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and educated at King's College, Taunton, which he described as "a dim, muscular Christian boot camp". He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1968.
Meades wrote reviews and articles for The Times for many years, and was specifically its restaurant critic from 1986 to 2001. He was voted Best Food Journalist in the 1999 Glenfiddich Awards. Having given up writing about English cuisine in 2001 after being The Times' restaurant critic for fifteen years, Meades estimated, in an interview with Restaurant magazine, that he had put on 5 lb a year during his reviewing period, which works out around an ounce per restaurant. By his own statement in the series Meades Eats, after being pronounced 'morbidly obese' he subsequently managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of a year.
His first collection of stories Filthy English was followed by Pompey (1993), which was widely praised and compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Dickens and Joyce amongst other great stylists.
Meades' An Encyclopaedia of Myself was published in May 2014 by Fourth Estate. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
Meades's book Museum Without Walls was published on the Unbound crowd-funding site, in both print and e-book editions.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hollow Men… “Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass…” Are Empty Wigs the next stage of deterioration? The blackest of black comedies…

The scents of my early teens were barbecued lamb and burning buildings. We listened to yé-yé and explosions, doo-wop and gunfire. We smoked Royale Goût Maryland. We picnicked at rocks under stone pines. The sea lapped our feet while a war raged around us. We danced the Madison by a battlefield’s edge. We couldn’t admit that paradise was provisional, that our heaven on earth was turning into hell. A hell we would have to flee. Lime sorbet tastes of immeasurable loss.

The zeitgeist… The beginning is thick with realias of time and place… Yé-yé – French pop… Doo-wop – a subgenre of rhythm and blues… Royale Goût Maryland – Gauloises cigarettes… Madison – a period dance… The middle of the last century… It’s the Algerian War of Independence… These almost romantic recollections belong to a sixteen-year-old Jewish assassin… Villainy of all kinds… “Revolutionaries kill their kin. They fight among themselves about what they are fighting for.”
And it’s just the beginning… Narration consists of fragments depicting all kinds of wickedness and vices… Moral degradation… Bodily pleasures as the highest good… 

I have pursued happiness through uninhibited, egotistical immersion in my dominant appetites. No one is spared, not Valentina, not Clara: they enjoy it, they were brought up to enjoy it. They have been tutored in a new kind of normal. I have denied myself nothing. Satiety is bliss. It takes will, concentration, dedication to achieve it. And buckets of dosh.

Common sense is substituted with mental fixations… Reason transforms into madness… Salaciousness and obscenity…

A satyr who loved too many, too much, a victim of carnal exhaustion, was embalmed in honey in a glass case in the entrance hall of Malpasfang Lodge. He was a centenarian when he died but had the teeth, shining hair and skin of an adolescent.
Wasps attracted by the honey eventually ate the taxidermised body leaving only hooves, horns, grimacing teeth, tufty clumps of hair, stained bones, flaps of now bark-like skin. Feel! Rough. They nested in the skull.

Voices of insanity… Voices of dementia… Voices of depravity and atrocity…

Anyone who claims they’re not turned on by freak shows is a hypocrite. What the fuck is the crucifixion if it’s not an S&M freak show? Other people’s pain is our pleasure. Our pain is our pleasure.

Vices capture and captivate human beings and reduce them to the state of brutes.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no chance of being able to summarise this behemoth of a "novel" (it's more a collection of connected stories - I think).

Meades somehow makes Nazis and bestiality (Heavy Petting Zoo anyone?) the subject of his scabrous wit.

I admit to losing track of the connections between the many characters but still very much enjoyed the journey

[Alex Sarll]

Finally. Yes, a thousand-page bastard of a book is always going to take a certain amount of time to read, more so when it's a hardback and you don't fancy lugging it out of the house, but on top of that I kept needing to take breathers because of the content. Within the first ten pages there's a scene which, on second thoughts, I'm not even going to attempt to describe euphemistically, perhaps by way of early warning that, while his earlier Pompey would assuredly be the biggest, nastiest novel most people would ever write, Jonathan Meades is not most people. And it gets significantly worse from there; that first narrator may be a revanchist not fussy about his targets as he fights the transfer of power in Algeria, but his successors include a priapic far right baronet who still has a particular thing for carwashes because they remind him of his bathtime sexual initiation by his mother, and a zealous SS man. On the rare occasions that a halfway decent person does make it on to the stage, they tend towards the pusillanimous and embarrassing at best; for Meades, it seems the joy of having so much space to work with is that he can lay into wellness woo and naff neologisms with just as much aplomb as oligarchs and super-injunctions, rapists and genocides.

Is there a point to all this wallowing, beyond the (not to be underestimated) delight of shouting a rude word? After all, given some of the yarn's wilder turns, it's not as if it can even claim the defence of unflinching realism so often used to excuse art that's a miserable ordeal. Well, for one thing, it has much more life than those endurance tests usually manage; no, it's not an easy read, but Meades' linguistic gifts are employed to ensure you're never too far from a startling turn of phrase, merciless lampoon or abstruse bilingual pun that's determined to raise at least a half-smile in even the most atrocious surroundings. The title recurs in multiple contexts, but always somewhere in the vicinity of absurd pretensions, hollow promises, and part of the project is to remind us that all those terrible things we like to think of as safely isolated in dark pockets of history are nothing of the sort; they run through the respectable bits too, linger in the present, are ready to seep out again at any moment from beneath the fancy veneer. Regrettably for Meades' reputation for prescience, even more regrettably for the world, that has already become painfully obvious over the time Empty Wigs spent being written and then published*, especially as regards resurgent anti-Semitism and the carnage which can be wrought by curdled self-pity. But as vast as Empty Wigs' cast is, even after you subtract the various doublings and reinventions, somehow it all feels more manageable seeing it encapsulated by these cursed, interlocking lineages of dogs, Doggs and doggers, pushed and pulled by base appetites and supposedly noble ideals, ever more tangled by tides of endogamy and exogamy (or, in layman's terms, incest and bestiality). There is a plot, of sorts, one with a knowing debt to an earlier era of mammoth novels, but it only gradually becomes apparent, and as with a lot of books this hefty (Jerusalem, Monument Maker – either of which could also be an alternate title for Empty Wigs, come to think of it), that's secondary to the sheer sense of capaciousness. All human life is here – and as far as Meades is concerned, we're all dreadful.

*This was the first book I ever successfully backed on Unbound, which advertised itself as a revolutionary crowdfunding publisher, and only just managed to ship me the book before messily imploding. I shall avoid actionable language, reporting only that a lot of their authors and customers seem unhappy about how that went down, while the head honchos have moved on to a legally distinct successor entity which thinks it retains Unbound's rights while being unbound by their responsibilities. Also, isn't that dust jacket hideous? None of this is good, obviously, certainly not for Meades and the distribution of Empty Wigs. But it does feel exactly like a subplot from Empty Wigs.

[Pow Wow · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded down. This one has it all: An upmarket colony devoted to inter-species inbreeding that gets transformed into Führer World attraction park, homicidal florists cum accidental abortionists, prostitutes that speak in broken English but have the vocabulary of Oxford comp lit graduates, Heinrich Himmler's corpse making an appearance in an Israeli gameshow, fathers and daughters who lose contact only to be reunited in matrimony later on, Jewish secret agents traversing the globe. A grand, baroque, no holds barred satire, somewhat hard to pin down and even harder to get through. It'll test your English vocabulary as well as your knowledge of history, philosophy, architecture and cuisine but you'll likely end up knowing a thing or two more after finishing it. Keeping a dictionary and an ecyclopaedia (or your mobile) nearby comes handy. It's a treasure trove of bonmots and acidic putdowns, sometimes vain, never snobbish or stuffy though. At various stages it's rather difficult to parse what's going on, but there's some incredibly well-structured tales in here as well (the rock star bit, the florist's tale, the father and daughter one). Make no mistake, it's a novel that takes time, effort and a fair bit of concentration but I'd argue it rewards it as well. Would love to see this on the Booker longlist, from a purely formal standpoint it absolutely deserves it, but I don't think they have the guts for it.

[isaacq · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gleefully disgusting in pretty much every way one could imagine a text to be. Frequently gave me that urge to look over my shoulder lest someone see the kind of reprehensible filth I was reading.

Meades is terrifyingly adept at writing incredibly hateful things about various marginalized groups, all in-character of course, but when the vileness is this constant across 1000 pages you gotta wonder. At the very least, dude is an uncompromisingly miserable misanthrope... but goddamn can he tell a story!

For those just going in, yes the dozens upon dozens of character and lore connections are bewilderingly complex to keep track of, but not crucially important to the rhythm of the world he's built. It is all building to something gratifyingly huge, so just go with it.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

after wrestling with all 3500 pages of vollmann's rurd what better breezyblock light reading as relief than meades' obvious play for a masterpiece. there's too much flab and laxness in it to compare for me with the always perfect pompey but there's so much writing here which is so good it manages to overpower all the infuriating flaws of meades as he is now, the anti-doctrinist blind to his own doctrine, critic of ideology who doesn't recognise his own thinking as an ideology and thus is blind to his hypocrisy. it dredges up so much from his entire prior career it's almost the book he's been writing his whole life