Meades - Pompey

If Meades was a racehorse youd be calling for a stewards enquiry. Theres something in his feed which definitely gives him the lot. Hes working at terribly high octane Meades has taken on a lot of the set pieces of the novel. Hes taken on wonderful challenges. Hes made Belgium interesting. Hes done a fabulous Heart of Darkness take on the pygmy hunting in Africa. Hes handled a staple of the proletarian novel, which is the abortion scene, which goes through from James Curtis in the s to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and he does that beautifully Meades handles the whole sexual side of it like William Burroughs by way of Beryl Cooke

Iain Sinclair, Kaleidoscope

Disgusting and brilliant Written with relentless energy and rhythm, phrase after phrase of the novel is highly crafted the book is less wrought than spewed: a torrent of obsessive, angry, imaginative fireworks. Among the influences on Meadess style are the time-shifting principles of quantum physics, street slang and, with parenthetical page references throughout, literary deconstruction. The prose, constantly preening itself in its own dark mirror, is the authors greatest achievement and should earn Meades justifiable comparison to such modernist novelists as James Joyce and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Thomas Pynchon and Martin Amis While Meadess novel risks imagining the unimaginable and speaking the unspeakable, it is not gratuitously shocking. Meades seems to evoke all of the disenchantment of recent history with a narrative that withstands the fictional realities of a century which saw the Holocaust and the invention of the bomb. He embraces his own disillusionment refusing to create a single sympathetic character. What is the point of good taste in an irreversible, out-of-control, wicked world?

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 could get to love it

David Profumo, Daily Telegraph

Pompey has a weirdly elegant architectonic to it, a sense of its own shape that is best got at by reading long and fast. And although it may sound cold and cynical, Pompey s dominant mood is rather dreamy, sad and puzzled, a feeling partly created by having Meades himself appear in his narrative as a heartlessly normal suburban middle-class thug Meades is interested in plumbing the mythological depths of lower-class southern English culture: it nouves and its wide-boys, its fleshpots and its gangs, the aspirations and the abjections hidden behind net curtains on pea-souped streets of rotting brick

Jenny Turner, Guardian

A vast, deranged epic which demands of its reader furious attention this book wont be explained: it is as much about pulling and twisting language as anything else (Englishness, grossness, sensation, nostalgia) It demands to be re-read the moment you finish it, if only because much of the first page is only explained by the last. Sometimes the relentless style bewilders and overwhelms, but there is more invention in a single page of Pompey than many young British novelists manage in fifty

Richard Preston, Harpers and Queen

Any page comes crammed with more freewheeling invention than many writers manage in a lifetime

Tom Shone, Sunday Times

As if in some sci-fi story which posits a world where the Boston Tea Party had never taken place, Pompey exists entirely in England and speaks an untainted English, or Anglo-Meadelish at least, even when it travels to Europe or Africa. The vernacular is pilfered from every class and condition of Englishman bless his chops, do his tronc, bint, jankers, a list of sexual euphemisms which could be extracted and published separately as an addendum to Partridge and every age from the thirties to the fifties, stopping only at that coffee bar period when we started swapping our homespun neologisms for the flashier Yankee versions. In anyone elses hands a money-spinning revivalist preacher would look across the Atlantic to Jim Bakker or Billy Graham for its influence: only Meades would find it in Max Miller

John Diamond, The Times