Product Description

From the author of The Fowler Family Business comes a reissue of his infamous, intensely distilled epic, Pompey. This novel recounts scores of stories: of HoTLoVe, OMO, AO-1; of a pygmy hunt, an assassination, a crucifixion; of a human blood bank and a man with metal in his head and a dentist with nasty habits; of sick sex, ill winds, malignant diseases; of the Voys, the Halals, the Puppymen. Most of all it tells the story of a flaky pyrotechnicist, Guy Vallender, and of his four progeny, chief among them Poor Eddie, who was quarry, whose gifts were otherwordly, whose gruesome fate was perhaps transcendent. The action stretches seamlessly between the mid 40s and the mid 70s; its many topographies include Brussels, Salisbury, the Teutoburgerwald, the Congo, the industrial wastes of Lorraine. But the dominant setting is the titular city -- a nightmarish brick grid set on mud a populated by garish freaks. It is here that the characters move to their unique and inexorable ends, fuelled by the bad faith of the former comedian Ray Butt's Church Of The Best Ever Redemption and by the bad blood of the gerontophiliac Jean-Marie. Pompey is a witty, gripping, emotionally harrowing work by our most viciously inventive writer -- part hallucinatory adventure, part unhappy family saga, part perverse tragedy of the fundamentalist delusion, it is persistently, hurtfully entertaining. And it includes footnotes. Heed the author's warning: 'After using this book please wash your hands.' That way you'll cleanse the stain of corruption, the reek of life as it's really lived (in Meades's fervid imagination).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #690196 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
/ 'An extraordinary work, peopled by the repellent, dwelling on the vile and yet done with so deft and brilliant a touch: a picnic in the heart of darkness. The writing is clever and complex, multi-layered and funny ! What a dark pleasure it is to come across writing that is both luminous and bilious.' Susan Jeffreys, New Statesman / 'The English novel needs its senses to be violently deranged, and this piledriver of a book ! might just provide a kick-start.' Elizabeth Young, Independent on Sunday / 'One admires the virtuosity, the creative nerve that enabled Meades to boldly go where few writers would dare.' Andrew Clements, Financial Times / 'There is no doubt that Pompey is the product of a brilliant mind: one would not, however, wish to dine with its author." Nick Hornby, TLS / 'A brilliant blockbuster," Melvyn Bragg, Start the Week / 'If Meades was a racehorse you'd be calling for a steward's enquiry. There's something in his feed which definitely gives him the lot.' Iain Sinclair / 'Disgusting and brilliant ! written with relentless energy and rhythm, phrase after phrase of this novel is 'highly crafted'.' Paul Spike, Vogue / 'With its mutilations, voyeurism, in-jokes, phantasmagoric idiolect and cruel humour, this is a harrowing and quite extraordinary book. It is lurid and ingenious ! but so perverse you get to love it.' David Profumo, Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Jonathan Meades is the author of Filthy English, Peter Knows What Dick Likes and The Fowler Family Business. He has written and performed in some twenty-five TV films on such subjects as the utopian avoidance of right angles, vertigo's lure, beer and Birmingham's appeal. Jonathan Meades contributed a weekly column about restaurants to The Times from 1986-2002.

Customer Reviews

The finest British writer since Anthony Burgess
This is a book by a man who takes words seriously and knows how to enjoy himself with them. Modern British writers tend to be all style over substance (Amis, Self, Welsh in discursive mode) or no-style over no-substance (Parsons, Garland, Welsh out of discursive mode). Meades is style and substance, and truckloads of both, and his grasp of the English demotic rivals that of the great Robin Cook (no, not the hack who gave us Toxin and Coma, but the Robin Cook who gave us The Crust on its Uppers). That Pompey didn't win, wasn't even nominated for, the Booker is a national disgrace. It is, quite simply, the most extraordinary thing done with, and to, the English language in a long time, and it established Meades as the finest British writer since Anthony Burgess.

Idiosyncratic, bleak, filthy and immense fun
Meades' passions for architecture, atheism, gastronomy, the unmentionable underbelly of English society and kinky sex suffuse this marvellously gamey epic tale of some very nasty people in an equally nasty fictionalised Portsmouth (although the action moves all over an equally degraded world).

Marvellously dark, macabre, grotesque and wickedly funny.

A repulsively fascinating saga of English lowlife
Some books are all about style over subject matter, but, with Pompey, Meades manages to have it both ways. The style is endlessly challenging and inventive, punning, alluding and deconstructing its way through an episodic dissection of the lower reaches of England, with sidetrips to Belgium and the Congo thrown in for good measure. Pompey is a complex novel that takes in post-war corruption, abortion, AIDS (or Meades's version of it), crackpot cults, pygmey hunting and music-hall smut and finds something incisive and, at the same time, blackly comic to say about all of them. One of the most extraordinary things done with, and indeed to, the English language for a long time, it puts Meades right up there with the best of them. More please, and soon.