For a book hot off the press, Empty Wigs has made a surprisingly substantial contribution to linguistic studies. Some 753 expressions from Jonathan Meades’s new novel have already found their way into the online dictionary of English slang maintained by the maverick lexicographer Jonathon Green. These include ‘gamahuche’ and ‘hundred-to-eight’ (both terms for oral sex), though not, disappointingly, ‘getting off the train at Fratton’ – an old naval euphemism for the withdrawal method of contraception. Readers are unlikely to get through the novel’s thousand or so pages without pausing to contemplate the meaning of ‘lobcock’ or ‘beazle’. 

If any publisher’s ‘sensitivity prefects’, as Meades calls them, had lent their services to Empty Wigs, they could justifiably have requested an overtime fee and compensation for personal trauma. As well as being a treasury of forgotten profanities, the novel is a thorough run-through of every topic you should never bring up at a dinner party. The narrative’s pivotal event is an experiment, carried out by eccentric aristocrats in the late 19th century, in mating humans with animals; a number of pages are given over to eugenics, cannibalism and sex work. In a novel much concerned with exposing the hypocrisies of religion, one faith, barely veiled under a fictional name, is said to have issued from a ‘kiddy-fiddling warrior rapist’. You suspect that Meades will be a little irked if Empty Wigs doesn’t get him cancelled. 

The novel – Meades’s third – is organised into nineteen chapters, each narrated by one of a large cast of characters. It isn’t always immediately apparent how the narrators or their stories fit together. Meades tends to plunge us, at the head of each chapter, into a fog of