The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

An inventively nasty, gruesomely comic paean to the sylvan heights of Forest Hill and Upper Norwood, a warped map of the death trade’s quotidian strangeness.

Henry Fowler was twice, long ago, runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition. His intense loyalties are to his parents, to his wife and children, to the family firm and the trade it practises, to his native south-east London and to his best friend Curly, traffic wonk and surviving brother of his former best friend who fell to his death at Norwood Junction. Well into middle age, and Henry’s life is running smoothly as he always hoped it would.

But his wife’s tennis partner, a celebrity florist and BBC2 star is accidentally beheaded by his electric hedgecutter while crimping a three metre high topiary poodle; Curly, newly married and eager for a child is diagnosed as suffering ‘waterworks problems’; and Henry, suddenly doubtful of his wife’s fidelity, cuts a lock of his sleeping daughter’s hair. The foundations of a world, a family and an identity begin to rock.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

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]

Compared to the compendious grotesquerie of Pompey, Meades' eventual follow-up novel is a slim and subtle thing. True, there are memorably horrid images (which I shall not repeat, for this is a book where I'd feel worse about spoiling the ingenious verbal details than the plot) and some terrible behaviour, but this time it is mostly the small awfulnesses of England, of the quiet people in south-east London's "long suburbs". Towards the end there is one interlude with a temp which for me slightly unbalanced the tone and complicated the plot to no great end; I think she would have been much more at home in Pompey. Otherwise, though that was a family saga, this is much more a book about family, and specifically one dynasty of Norwood funeral directors; their terrible jokes and well-meant lies. The reviews quoted on the back all speak of a comedy, albeit a jet-black one, but to me it was primarily a sad book, and not even the bitter sadness one associates with Meades' jeremiads, but in the way Gray's 'Elegy' is sad.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsentimental, by which I mean unpleasant.

On fertility and death, delusion and meaning, undertakers and civil engineers. Many beautiful passages, much reflection on the course of recent British history - but never didactic -

Ben and Ben's fellow squash prodigy, keen, bulgy-muscled Nolan Oates lolled side by side on a striped recliner and a Portofino chair chosen by Naomi and bought by Henry out of the fruits of his labours burying and burning the dead for the children of the dead.

They cycled through the night, not knowing where they were going, ignoring maps, signposts, stars, anxious only to be far from that flat scrubland. Fear fuelled their tendons, pushed the pedals hard. They were oblivious to the sycamore’s grazes and to the stiff hills. Their tyres purred. They passed hamlets, silos, byres, kennels, the illumined windows of hostile hearths. The swarthy bulk of a moor’s escarpment slumped against the sky, a beast best left to lie. The world was every shade of black: slave, sump, crow, char. Clumsy clouds lumbered into each other, blind, bloated, slomo, piling up in a piggyback of obese buggers over the terrible trees. The night was loud with the shrieks and moans of creatures berating their fate and their want of shelter. When the rain came it was from a sluice that stretched from one horizon to the next. The road became a tide against them.

and anyway it's extremely well-grounded in Meades' obsessive attention to detail (not just artistic detail, any detail)

The miracle of life. That baby could now bring a carbon-fibre racket into contact with a rubber ball travelling at 90 m.p.h. in such a way that the ball’s speed would be so reduced that when it touched the front wall of the court it would plummet vertically to the floor. That was a miracle. And so was the human ingenuity which made the connection between that ball’s terminal trajectory and a dead bird and advertised that ingenuity by the use of the figurative construction ‘to kill a ball’. Telephones, butterfly stroke, nylon-tip pens, the emotive capability of music, the way some people are blond and some are left-handed, the shapes of faces in clouds, water’s inability to flow uphill, the tastiness of animals’ flesh, pain, bustles, reptiles’ poison sacs, sinus drainage, cantilevering, DNA testing – miracles of life, all of them.

Meades is an aesthete - but still rightly unforgiving of art in the wrong place, here an experimental postmodernist roundabout that kills five.

It get better when it stops sneering. The middle section portrays two professions, two quiet lives: funeral director and civil engineer, warm family man and late bloomer:

Exclusion, Henry recognised, was what defined every profession. He practised it himself. It was what differentiated him from civilians. Without exclusion and the stamp of expertise it brought … well, the unthinkable might occur: the bereaved might realise that they could do it themselves, take the law into their own hands. They’d conduct backyard cremations. They’d dig graves in their gardens as though burying the family pet.

The middle seems natalist; the nuclear family seem much happier. Just wait. The death of your parents as only their being "denied a future of rages, chair-lifts, incontinence, slobbering aphasia, fright, wind, butter on the rug, soup on the cardie... How long he would have had to prepare himself for the embalming job of a lifetime, how long he would have had to watch as all dignity left her and she became a machine for processing soup into diarrhoea. It might be painful watching them turn into veg, decline into insentient senescence before our eyes but at least it’s a process that acquaints us with loss gradually.".

(Meades contrives a neat point about human nature: when the Crystal Palace burns down, the fire engines couldn't reach it to save it because the roads are congested with spectators. This isn't accurate but whatev.)

Oscillates between sympathy and unforgiving light; suddenly swerves away from two offered happy endings. Not sure what to make of the grim climax - the cuckold going off the deep end, becoming unmoored from his home, his work, his decency. Meades is no patriarch, so the implication shouldn't be 'so would you'. I think it's about the madness of biology, its inhumane imperatives and tragic spread.

Good but not a patch on his films.

[Steve Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meades' films are great but this novel is a disappointment. A mean spirited black comedy, mildly amusing in places with predictable plot twists. I expected much more from this.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s always a pleasure to read Meades’ prose and this novel provides plenty of good examples of the beauty of his prose and the flexibility of his imagination. So why the 3 stars then? Why not more? Well, firstly, Meades seems, as he did with Pompey, to only to be able to write about a recent past, the 50s and 60s, and whilst this novel does have action later than that, it is difficult to feel that this is anything other in routed in that era. Secondly, whilst the plot is clearly thought out and presented, it doesn’t really, to me at least, have much of an impact. I certainly enjoyed the novel, just not as much as I wanted to to I guess.

[Kevin Findlay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of good writing and some great ideas for a story, but it never really made it's point. Not a bad read though.

[mytwocents · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meades is on form with his trademark puns and gruesome wit.

[Andy Watt · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you know Meades then you'll get a sense of what this book is going to be like to read - multilayered, tightly woven and intricately detailed. There was some writing I read again and then read out aloud - so good was the description and sentiment contained in pithy prose. But...it's like he needed to be in the real-world more if he was going to write about the real world. The plot is, to be blunt, rubbish and the convoluted prose wearing by the time this short novel wraps up. It reminded me of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in its inability to grasp how "normal" people act and react. It'd make a quite passable TV show I think with some of the denser prose expunged. I was left sufficiently cold to take it straight to the charity shop.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Jonathan Meades book that I have read, following a relatively recent introduction to his television work. The black humour was the real highlight of this book for me, along with Meades' amusing observation of sometimes very unattractive behaviours in his characters. I enjoyed the book for being thought-provoking (especially about identity) and for the use of sometimes archaic or obscure words which occurred at just the right frequency not to drive me mad with needing to look them up. I definitely want to read more Meades.

[Grim-Anal King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great comic novel in which it is difficult not to see Meades strolling around (in the style of his documentaries) while launching acerbic attacks on his characters.

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expect this is a love it or hate it kind of book. Interesting voice, farcical plot, give it a miss if you're easily offended.

[Mhartain O'Treasaigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not great, found it slow to get going.

[John B · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had to make any negatives, I would say that the plot is a little clunky, has a very episodic feel, and the plot pieces don't mesh with each other that much. Also decipehering the the dialogue of the blind temp (you'll have to read the book to find out about her!) is harder work than it needs to be. If you're familiar with the streets of south and east London, you'll get a great deal more from the book, but for those like me who only ever visited for a day out, a lot of the street names and landmarks mentioned are just that, their implied significance may be lost to you.

But overall, it's a great book. For me, though, it's the descriptive passages that make it. For example, the description of when Henry visits his parents' home where he had grown up, very poignant.

I also relish Meades' use of arcane words and phrases to add colour to the text. Usually find this rather pretentious, but here it just works, especially if you are familiar with Meades' TV work, strolling around, commenting on architecture, history and society. As an aside, the beauty of reading this on a Kindle is that you can look up those words as you go - my Word of the Day list in the kitchen has exploded!

May not be for everyone, but certanly an entertaining and thought-provoking book.