An introduction to the re-publication of a novel with which many will be unfamiliar should seek to achieve two aims. First, it should tell the potential reader why the book is worth reading. Second, it should seek to give a flavour of what the book is about: without giving away the story, or rendering it pointless to persist with it. In relation to the second point, perhaps it helps to give one supporting argument relevant to the first. Even if the plot of Pompey were to be revealed here, the book would still demand to be read because of its originality, its attention to truth, its verve, its radicalism and, above all, its author’s exhaustive and almost exhausting command of language and metaphor.
Meades himself has several walk-on parts in Pompey, in one of which he sodomises a casual female acquaintance at a teenage party. To observe that that is one of the less disgusting features of a frequently distasteful narrative gives you the measure of the book. As the late News of the World used to say, all human life is there; and with it, every aspect of that life, however taboo, however extreme in its repellence. But then this is an epic of the South Country, stretching over thirty years (and this is just in its English locations) from Wiltshire to Southampton and finally to the eponymous city itself, Portsmouth, a place brim-full of freaks and monsters and restless social mobility for whom ‘dystopian’ is an inadequate adjective.
Why read Pompey? It is a work of genius. It is one of the outstanding works of English fiction of the last half-century. It is unremittingly disgusting, but unremittingly entertaining. It is cruel in its humour, but accurate in its depictions, whether of character or of atmosphere. It contains penetrating insights into the nature of being, and into the nature of our culture. In the quality of writing and innovativeness of plot and character it is apart from all other novels of the last half-century. It is as well that no serious person measures literary merit by Booker prizes and the like, for if it were so then Pompey would have had to win scores of them. It is one of the last truly great novels of the 20th century, and for it not to be better known is perhaps not least because of the way in which it cocks its leg, and then squats, over what passes for literary sensibilities in our culture.
What is Pompey about? The list is long. It starts, or so it seems, to be about the dislocation in society in the late 1940s and beyond, when men came back from war changed and broadened by it and in some cases stripped of any sense of morality. It is about the sexual revolution that was forced on the puritanical classes of the post-war era not by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones but by the spread of the lax behaviour of their inferiors (and of their betters). It is ostensibly about the fates of the four children of one man, Guy Vallender, who meets the first of several spectacular deaths endured by various of the characters. Vallender is no ordinary ex-officer trying to re-adjust to civvy street; he is a priapic and promiscuous firework manufacturer.
It is a book about the shortness of life, and of the absurdities inherent in life, be it long or short. Peculiarly, it is also a book about how Meades imagines Aids came out of Africa. Above all Pompey is a book about atheism, religion being mocked and derided through the Church of the Best Ever Redemption, founded by a double-amputee retired comedian who killed his wife in a car crash when eight times over what would become the legal limit, having had rather too many treble scotches for the road in the age before the breathalyser. The death of the comedian’s wife is as good an indication as any of how Meades presents life, or rather death, in all its unspeakable glory: the comedian is ‘the drunk they cut from the wreck, in a coma, with the inside of his wife’s face all down his dinner suit’. One of the commanding aspects of Meades’s writing is his almost Dickensian obsession with detail, though Meades, unlike Dickens, uses it to enhance the idea of life as a parody of itself: he goes on to tell us, in relation to the gore-soiled dinner suit, that its wearer ‘was a pioneer of the shawl collar look too’.
Meades’s genius consists principally in his originality, though he has his antecedents. There is a picaresque flavour to the writing that imitates Sterne or Fielding. There is a deliberate, brick-throwing disregard for convention and restraint that echoes Samuel Butler, not least in Meades’s own determination to settle scores with adherents of religion and their questionable ideas. But most of all there is an experimentalism and erudition that smack of Joyce, not just in the dense use of language but in the author’s apparently puerile, but in fact equally parodic, insistence on being shocking.
However, life is shocking: the everyday unpleasantnesses and explicitnesses of it only cease to shock us because we become inured to them. We are not, yet inured to them when they are described with such belligerency, frequency and intensity as Meades does in his novel. In general speech, life and thought there remain many taboos; but there are no taboos for Meades. Incest, sodomy, bestiality, anal rape, near-necrophilia, gerontophilia, masturbation, auto-erotic enemas (the cause of one of the more startling demises in the book) and fellatio are but some of the sexual functions freely and carefully depicted. Other bodily functions, notably scatological, occur with inevitability. Backstreet abortion is vividly described, though with a typically Meadesian twist; one of the most arresting phrases in the book is after a second abortion, when the foetus is said to have committed ‘proxy suicide’. However, the avoidance of birth is, by that point, to be viewed as the avoidance of entering into a profoundly dysfunctional family, whose members have little but hatred for each other, and stand in uncertain relations to each other, not least because of Guy Vallender’s copulative freedom. Most bodies are vile, their deformities and blemishes recounted with meticulousness, although it is amusing that the book’s leading weakling is endowed with a penis of awesome size. Life, like death, among Meades’s creations is always extreme. Nothing goes unobserved, and therefore nothing goes unexploited. The climax of the book, in which so many of its themes come together, exemplifies this.
Pompey’s thirty-year span examines not so much the lives of its characters, but of a coarse, earthy, unpretentious idea of Englishness. The Belgians may intrude, the Congo may feature, the French secret service and its torturers may get a look-in, but this is a book about England. Had another not already commandeered the title, Pompey could just as easily have been called Scenes from Provincial Life. They are scenes from a period of social change more rapid and more profound than perhaps at any time in our history.
At times the book harbours a narrative of deliberate obscurity – which becomes one of the many jokes to be played on the reader. Meades cannot resist giving away snippets from the future, and dropping in the odd footnote. For him, these are real people, and this is real life, to be documented as such. It is his achievement that by the time the reader attains the otherwise incredible ending, the events it describes appear all too credible. The writing is heavily adjectival, but these are adjectives the author has minted for himself, rather as Joyce did: ‘balloon breasted’, ‘food-mixed’, ‘dungsteaming’ turn up within the first few pages. They are necessary to give a fresh picture of ancient, rotting concepts: almost every bodily function imaginable (and some unimaginable), lubriciousness, ugliness, deformity, all the aspects of freakishness that mark out Meades’s characterisation, and all the odours and festering sights that create his environment. Yet all this stench and putrescence, literal and metaphorical, are contained in an England all too recognisable, and all too real.
That reality hinges as much on the author’s attention to detail as upon anything else. Meades’s own loves and obsessions litter the book: his knowledge of food and architecture, and his appreciation of the minutiae of contemporary culture, notably in the branding of products, whose everyday banality he uses to ratchet up the sense of portentous absurdity in the lives of his creations. But in keeping with a work that focuses upon the rudiments of life, the food theme that courses through the book is one predominantly of offal; the architecture is of modern cheap and nasty (though he does single out at one point the Crittall window, circa 1937, which was neither); and the brands popular and disposable.
Meades’s cast of characters ooze sleaze, venality, depravity, repellence, ignorance and absurdity. But he seems to be saying – not least about himself, hence his own intrusions into the narrative – that if we all look ourselves with sufficient thoughtfulness and care, we too have those failings and vices. There is little keeping most of us from tripping over the line from dignity into absurdity. It is the News of the World all over again. He prefaces his own work with the imprecation: ‘After using this book please wash your hands.’ But all he has done is confront us with ourselves.
Simon Heffer