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"Go to Empty Wigs for prose that never ceases to dazzle, for an extended holiday from contemporary pieties and to disgrace yourself with laughter" — Paul Genders, Literary Review
Empty Wigs is a hallucinatory ride through the twentieth century that will cement Jonathan Meades as one of the great imaginative writers of our age.
It moves from bloody Algiers in 1962 to the Welsh Marches in the late nineteenth century, from Lüneburg Heath to suburban southern England. Its characters are damned and doomed. They exert free will so make terrible choices. Their appetites are base. Their lives are without end. They lurch to extremes. From euthanasia to terrorism and political assassination, with secrets and betrayals, great gothic houses and pseudo-scientific experiments, Empty Wigs is a vast compendium of tales from the jungle of existence which show humankind at its most abject.
Many of its stories are bleak, perverse, harrowing. Many are tragically farcical. But the writing is neon-rich, gorgeous and baroque, funny and joyfully offensive. Told through frames within frames, mazes within mazes, colliding narratives and quick changing moods, Empty Wigs is a late modern masterpiece and a return to the novel’s origins.
"Loudly immoral, deafeningly well written and indiscriminately offensive, Meades’s novel is a breath of filthy air in a puritanical age." — The Times
"A head-spinning turn that can quicken from high farce into deep seriousness, vaulting across time and space . . . no one is safe from its satirical edge." — Daily Telegraph
"He has an omnivorous curiosity and well-bred palate. These gifts are on show at all times, and at the level of the sentence. He finds the mot juste, the striking reference, to complete every brilliant line. Is it all a bit too much? Reader, it is." — The Observer
"The horrifying, hilarious, always compelling labyrinth that is Empty Wigs." — TLS
"Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing the police in different voices." — Spectator
"It is as if Firbank, Anthony Burgess, Nabokov and Mervyn Peake had hunkered down in Elysium to concoct sentences over draughts of absinthe, and had then dispatched the result to Meades in a fever dream." — Oldie
"Three hundred and whatever glorious and on occasion incomprehensible words . . . In every sense, a mag. op." — Jonathon Green, editor of Green’s Dictionary of Slang
"I was remind of a huge museum of taxidermy with all the characters duly fucked and stuffed accordingly. Bravo" —Chris Petit, author of The Psalm Killer