Pompey: A Novel

by Jonathan Meades

At first glance, Jonathan Meades's 1993 masterpiece is a post-war family saga set in and around the city of Portsmouth. This doesn't come close to communicating the scabrous magnificence of Meades's creation.

Pompey is an obscene, suppurating vision of an England in terminal decline. The story begins with Guy Vallender, a fireworks manufacturer from Portsmouth, who has four children by different four different women. There's Poor Eddie, a feeble geek with a gift for healing; 'Mad Bantu', the son of a black prostitute, who was hopelessly damaged in the womb by an attempted abortion; Bonnie, who is born beautiful but becomes a junkie and a porn star; and finally Jean-Marie, a leather-wearing gay gerontophiliac conceived on a one-night stand in Belgium.

The narrator is 'Jonathan Meades', cousin to Poor Eddie and Bonnie, who tells the story of how their strange and poisonous destinies intersect. And although there is no richer stew of perversity, voyeurism, corruption, religious extremism and curdled celebrity in all of English literature, there is also an underlying compassion and a jet-black humour which makes Pompey an important and strangely satisfying work of art. Prepare to enter the English novel's darkest ride…

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

561 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Alex Sarll]

Magnificent and grotesque, the tale of four siblings who do not know their relation (and yes, the inevitable ensues, but incest is the least of the crimes recorded here). The tale, too, of Portsmouth - both in itself and as a fractal chunk of Britain, the West, the whole stinking modern world. Meades, making occasional appearances, is the only omniscient narrator I've ever seen literally fuck one of his characters up the arse (the rest get the same treatment in the figurative sense). He does amazing things with English, packing the prose with pun and allusion, twisting it into tangles of imagery, and above all using its many, many methods to disgust. Even before a plague is unleashed, clearly standing in for HIV but also anticipating Ebola, this is a book about the human body's fundamental ickiness, about the unfair miracle that something so fragile can also be so endlessly productive of vileness. Pynchon and Joyce are the obvious points of reference, but the former has his grand constructions and the latter a certain cosiness; in neither does the sheer horridness reign as unchecked as here. It is, in short, not a nice book - and in a way the book itself (the story knows itself as a physical object) feels contaminated. I felt slightly less healthy while reading it; I did not want to leave it atop any pile of books, lest the taint air more easily. It is the sort of book that makes me understand the urge which sets people to banning books.

[Ian Meades · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best work of fiction I have ever read. More invention on one page than most authors achieve in ten books. To this day I still can not understand why Pompey isn't regarded as one of the greatest books in the English language - other than lit circle snobbery towards the author, a restaurant critic at the time. Check out too his amusing BBC documentaries and collection of short stories 'Filthy English' - especially the one about the dog who works in porn. Aniseed.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fabulously disgusting book. It will turn the stomach of the average reader and make them, hurl it away in disgust. It is a rollicking tale of misfits, and con men, geeks, sexual misfits and damaged people. There is no happy ending, just a long succession of trials and tribulations to which the characters are exposed to, generally ending in messy deaths, set against the foul abscess that is Portsmouth. Wonderful stuff.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comparisons to Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow are apt. Joycean compulsive punning and cryptic crossword Tourette’s-ish word twisting and sentence scrambling, taking the London in Pynchon’s novel forward in time through the swinging sixties and beyond, but with the if-I-can-think-it-I-can-write-it filth and depravity of early Irvine Welsh. Glorious. Only wish I’d read a physical copy instead of on my phone.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

“After reading this book please wash your hands” reads the end of the first chapter. Having done so, I can report that ‘Pompey’ doesn’t really require that degree of cleansing. There are certainly some unsavoury incidents, but they are not out of keeping with Meades’ overall vision.

‘Pompey’ is not an easy read. The text is dense and adjective filled, some adjectives newly minted for the book. Meades’ vision is very distinct, although for some reason it reminds me of Le Carre in the parts of his novels when rum characters are living in the 50s and 60s, although Le Carre is very staid by comparison with Meades, but, then again, almost everything would be.

Overall, ‘Pompey’ is something well worth experiencing, and the fact that it an experience rather than a read points to its greatness.

[Jon Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meades is a unique talent across many fields. This is an excellent read where Meades draws upon his keen observations of the English class system and the venality therein. Less punch and more rambling than his short fiction, Meades develops situations more than characters, yet the repulsiveness of his main actors suffers not one iota for it.

At times his style, which serves him so well in short stories, begins to overwhelm the narrative. That aside, this is a deep dive into the recesses of the authors mind that one prays is imagined, not remembered.

[mytwocents · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explosive.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating and filthy and disgusting at the same time. Despicable and horrible charachters and I can never watch 'Only Fools and Horses' without thinking of this book.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

completely filthy, disgusting, sickening, enthralling, brilliant, staggering and heartbreakingly beautiful all at once

[Billy Degge]

Among the stinkiest books i've ever read. each page has its own unique concoction of puerile excess.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meades was, possibly still is, a journalist for The Times. Pompey, if I recall correctly, was his first work of fiction. Pompey is the nickname for Portsmouth in England. Meades patently has spent a lot of time there, for all I know he could be from there.

The novel follows the life of various Portsmouth inhabitants through a series of linked adventures, culminating in a rather gloomy chapter on death. It is quite a long novel, and not for the easily insulted. One quote that springs to mind in that regard being:

'She was anally raped by a black man the day she died.'

Make of it what you will, the writing is excellent.

[Nosemonkey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange, frequently unpleasant book, full of unexpected phrases, some excellent, and as a whole extremely hard to describe. Kind of like Gravity's Rainbow, only with more grimy suburban incest, less war, and not a single pleasant or relatable character - not even the narrator.

Not what I was expecting, being a long-time fan of Meades' documentaries - and, frankly, I'm not sure of this was brilliant or horrible.

[Timothy Urban]

It's very dense, I gave up. I suspect I'm not ready for this.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reeks of sleaze and chip oil!

[Kevin Tole · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 to 4 for this - a flawed but well readable book till meades starts to get too wordy, when it just becomes flowery. However, a real page turner and with some excellent writing too.

[Graham Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm pretty sure you could think of anything disgusting or horrific, and it would be in this novel.