The Fowler Family Business
Jonathan Meades Fourth Estate, 212pp, £10
ISBN 1857028481
The first of what threatens to be a sequence, Jonathan Meades's off-putting black comedy follows the fortunes of Henry Fowler, heir to a south London undertaker. Henry is rather strange - but beyond that, we never really get a handle on him. Besides, everyone in the book is rather strange. Partly this is deliberate and partly it isn't. Meades's gift for character is limited, and he makes people behave however each individual scene or gag requires them to behave. Only their names are consistent; everything else is all over the place. And at the end, Henry even decides to change his name, so he might not be identifiable in the next volume at all.
The plot, such as it is, is triggered when Henry, in a momentary fit of pique, pushes his boyhood friend Stanley off a high bridge over the railway at Norwood Junction. The inquest decides that Stanley fell; he was walking on the parapet, after all. This episode, set in 1961, is connected synchronistically with the trial of a serial killer and a fictitious Joe Meek record called "Teresa" (not to be confused with the Joe Dolan hit). The news and the record are the last things the boys hear on the radio before the fatal walk to the station. Possibly these are threads to be picked up later in the series. Or possibly not. The whole exercise is so shapeless and uncontrolled you can't tell.
Henry takes up with Stanley's younger brother, Curly. "Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry . . . It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience." Clear? Henry carries on his father's funeral business; Curly becomes a traffic-flow consultant and designs the disastrous "experimental mini-roundabout cluster" in Beckenham which later claims the lives of Henry's parents, or rather the people Henry thinks are his parents.
Dubious parentage is the order of the day here. Henry's remarkable dissimilarity to his mum and dad is underlined from the start. Curly, discovering he is infertile, asks Henry, who has two kids, to impregnate Mrs Curly as a favour. When this fails, Henry learns from a Harley Street doctor that he, too, is infertile, the result of that Cornish camping trip when he and Curly got tin poisoning from a polluted stream. So who made Mrs Henry pregnant? Henry finds out, then the story goes off at a complete tangent for some reason.
The novel aspires to present a vision of England, but it's a pretty old one, all to do with rain, hypocrisy and dirty little secrets. Stanley's dad, who looms large at the outset and promptly drops off the narrative radar, is that hardy music-hall standby, a philandering salesman: "He travelled in hosiery and jocular smut." The judge sentencing the serial killer to death, we are told, "ejaculated as was his wont", the well-known kink attributed to the late Lord Goddard in real life.
The writing tends to a particular kind of pseudo-good awfulness that often results when journalists try to be novelists, going heavy on alliteration and assonance: "Clumsy clouds blundered into each other, blind, bloated, slomo, piling up in a piggyback of obese buggers over the terrible trees." It has its moments, though, usually when it turns a bit bonkers.
Describing the landscape of the Auvergne hills, where Henry takes his family on holiday, Meades writes: "It was as though the breasts of buried Amazons had been painted by a megalomaniac called Greenfinger."
The accidental self-decapitation of Mrs Henry's tennis partner, a gay TV gardener, is neatly summed up as "the old story: a blustery day, a wobbly stepladder, a hedge trimmer with a dodgy safety catch." The way the poor chap died "crimping the topiary poodle that was his pride, his joy, his trademark" lends a certain something to the scene as well.
The south London setting, "where the big Victorian mansions glared through dripping laurels and rhododendrons", is an asset, with the eerie, off-centre atmosphere that Conan Doyle and, for that matter, Mark Timlin have exploited to such advantage in the past. And there are casual grace-notes thrown in which show some stylishness: the slogan-like reference to "seborrhoea, the dandruff with the larger flake"; Mrs Henry's quaint use of reverse gear "as an auxiliary brake" when parking; the treatise on scrumpy and its remarkable cyanide content; the introduction of Father Roy, Rome's official "Chaplain to the M2 and M20". But on the whole, the book is an ugly mess.
Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic
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