Jonathan Meades occupies a strange, ill-defined yet distinctive position in English letters. A novelist, critic and TV presenter of playfully austere documentaries, his work extends across the arts and deep into food, united by a singular outlook: one of imperious scorn.
Even when he's celebrating something, his enthusiasm is as nothing compared to his condemnation of the hapless philistines who don't share it. It's a chastening experience to read or watch him in full flow, like being assailed by someone who's not only cleverer and more informed but who also gives the joyless impression of knowing it. Having made his mark in many disciplines, Meades has now turned his attention to one in which he has no peers – the subject of Jonathan Meades. He has written a sort of childhood memoir, albeit one organised in a disjointed fashion under a series of alphabetically arranged titles, illustrated here and there by WG Sebald-style black-and-white family photographs. An Encylopaedia of Myself begins with "Abuser, Sexual", a chapter that reveals Meades was not sexually abused as a child, and ends with "Yuri", about a friend, the grandson of Augustus John, who died from a heroin overdose.
Between his own non-abuse and his friend's heroin abuse is contained a vivid and sometimes haunting portrait of a lost England, specifically a disappeared southern England, and in particular a vanished Wiltshire.
Meades was an only child brought up in the sedate environs of Salisbury and seldom has the suffocating sense of self-absorption of the siblingless, of loneliness and boredom and of precocity, imagination and alienation, been more powerfully illustrated than in these penetrating memories of an adult-governed world.
Much of the book is focused on the 1950s (Meades was born in 1947), an era when people were called Reg and Beryl and the taxonomies of class were encoded in every action, word and owned object. Meades evocatively captures the social unease of the time reflected through a child's partial understanding. He was obviously an unnaturally observant youngster.
He admonishes himself at one point for his failure to appreciate the awesome antiquity of his surroundings. "For a long time," he writes, he was unable to summon appropriate humility. It was not until he was eight, he goes on, that he "began to get it". Eight! Oh those wasted years of five, six and seven when he should have been relishing the nearby neolithic delights.
As you'd expect from such an astute architectural critic, he's perceptive on places and buildings, but with one or two exceptions largely disdainful about other people. Too often characters from his early life – his parents' friends and relations – are dismissed for unpardonable flaws like "aggressive dreariness" or "smug ambition". Nor is he above damning, in passing, whole sections of society as morons and idiots. And he has a particular animus for Tony Blair, at whom he takes pot shots in random drive-by style with almost adolescent glee.
You could call it cynicism, misanthropy or a form of snobbery, but that isn't quite right. It's more like an attitude of heightened aesthetic discernment that the vast majority of humanity signally fails to demonstrate. His apprehension of everything seems to be shaped by an abhorrence of the commonplace or rather of a prosaic understanding of the commonplace.
In the unending war on cliche, Meades surely deserves several mentions in dispatches for his work in the counter-intuition department. But while his restless search for the original insight and the novel description is admirable and often bracingly enjoyable, it can sometimes produce prose of such dense richness that it's almost impossible to digest.
Morris dancing, for example, is an easy target, which doesn't deter Meades because his answer is to thwack it with heavy vocabulary and cultural learning, attacking its bogus folklore as "the clumsily terpsichorean analogue of a Voysey house or a Gimson settle". The perverse effect of this sort of intellectual showboating, however, is to achieve the unthinkable by generating a certain sympathy for morris dancers.
It's a generously digressive memoir that takes in archeology, history, art, architecture, politics, germ warfare and much else besides. There are no lazy reminiscences here, no thoughtless indulgences. Every page bristles with informed analysis and cogent argument, but the sheer weight of opinion can sometimes be crushing.
For beneath an intricate superstructure of capital letter themes, there is a melancholically formative tale of childhood longing that Meades works a little too hard to suppress. We learn at the end, almost as an afterthought, that his parents sent him to boarding school in Devon, despite there being a better grammar school in Salisbury. He was never told why they made this decision, but he concludes: "Most likely they never wanted me around."
This is not a book that parades feelings of abandonment. But it is one that memorably grapples with the myths of belonging.
