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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).
[Taken from Amazon.co.uk]
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).
[Taken from Amazon.co.uk]
- GenresFictionContemporary
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
14 people are currently reading
210 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Meades
25 books51 followersJonathan 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
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October 24, 2014Magnificent 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.
December 16, 2013
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.
May 1, 2018
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.
September 27, 2025
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.
March 11, 2019
“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.
‘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.
April 23, 2021
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.
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.
June 6, 2017
Explosive.
August 20, 2018
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.
July 18, 2019
completely filthy, disgusting, sickening, enthralling, brilliant, staggering and heartbreakingly beautiful all at once
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February 25, 2024Among the stinkiest books i've ever read. each page has its own unique concoction of puerile excess.
November 12, 2008
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.
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.
March 26, 2016
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.
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.
Want to read
August 16, 2012It's very dense, I gave up. I suspect I'm not ready for this.
June 15, 2012
Reeks of sleaze and chip oil!
May 12, 2013
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.
June 29, 2018
I'm pretty sure you could think of anything disgusting or horrific, and it would be in this novel.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews