At first glance, Jonathan Meades's 1993 masterpiece
Pompey 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
vision. He writes like Martin Amis on acid, creating an
obscene, suppurating vision of an England in terminal
decline. The story begins with Guy Vallender, a
fireworks manufacturer from Portsmouth (Pompey), 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 - 'He has done
for Portsmouth (Portsmouth, for heaven's sake) what
Baudelaire did for Paris, Joyce for Dublin and Paul
Bowles for Tangier - One of the very best and most
absurdly underrated novels of the nineties.' STEPHEN
FRY, from his Preface
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