Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades review – a black museum of savage stories

“Warm bath telly” is how programme-makers describe cosy Sunday-night arts and history documentaries. Jonathan Meades, who has written and presented 50 films, brings a different energy to the game. A typical Meades piece-to-camera would find him in slightly menacing dark glasses intoning his clever, sardonic script while standing in front of a forbidding lump of brutalist architecture. If anyone was tempted to run a warm bath anywhere near him, he looks capable of dropping an electrical appliance into it.

Today Meades is on our screens less often. The commissions aren’t what they were. He doesn’t emote; he doesn’t have a floppy schoolboy fringe. He doesn’t do jolly hockey sticks. For TV executives, greater diversity in front of camera doesn’t noticeably extend to a wide range of writing or hosting styles. Luckily for his many admirers, Meades has more than one string to his bow. Once a must-read food critic, he’s also been a columnist, essayist, take-no-prisoners reviewer and novelist. From Meades’s Le Corbusier-designed apartment in his perhaps unlikely home of Marseille, birthplace of the great Zinedine Zidane and cockpit of drug gangs, he has now produced a 1,000-page novel. It’s not so much a doorstep as a block of raw concrete.

Meades is published by the crowdfunder Unbound, which says his book is “a hallucinatory ride in a gilded vessel through the sickness and labyrinthine squalor of the long 20th century”. In fact, this vehicle for Meades’s talents is more like a black maria or a hearse. The novel revisits some of the less edifying episodes and fatal attractions of the past hundred years or so. It ranges from the bloody end of French Algeria to experiments in euthanasia and eugenics, and terrorism in the name of God. Some of the characters and events are connected, others less so.

From its title onwards, and into its dark and sprawling interior, Empty Wigs harks back to a lost literary era, to an old idea of the novel as a gallimaufry: stories within stories. It recalls the three-volume potboilers of the Victorians described by Henry James as “baggy monsters”, and to even earlier antecedents such as Tristram Shandy. Laurence Sterne’s notoriously unfilmable novel would have obvious appeal to Meades, who has said of his small-screen oeuvre that it’s television for people who don’t watch TV. In Empty Wigs, a test-your-strength fairground shy of a book, Meades has very nearly succeeded in writing an unreadable novel.

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 author furnishes settings for a large cast of repellent brutes. Sometimes you wonder if he knows quite how repellent they are. Like life, his novel isn’t fair. But wrong ’uns get a righteous comeuppance. A debauched rock star must choose between having his axe-tickling fingers removed or suffering an insult to another tender part of his anatomy. A pretentious telly historian, “Inigo Horrocks”, is horribly silenced: Meades’s lampoon of a fellow talking head, or perhaps a mocking self-portrait?

Related: Jonathan Meades: ‘If I’d been in England, I’d be dead’

He can stage-manage a country house scene so that it would pass muster in the pages of Evelyn Waugh or the diaries of the toff-bothering James Lee Milne. But he recoils from the heartless society types he manoeuvres from the breakfast chafing dishes to the drawing room. Whatever Meades is, he’s not a snob: not the man who nurses a tendresse for maverick 1970s footballers with blowsy hairstyles.

This is strong meat, going on the turn. It’s not for you if you’re easily offended, and probably not even if you have difficulty being offended, either. It’s an unblinking inventory of every kind of illegal and unnatural act. Amid a cataract of bodily fluid, there is scarcely a drop of human kindness. Meades’s pitiless mockery of cant and political chicanery is in the tradition of his namesake, Swift.

He has said of his favourite novels by Waugh and Nabokov: “The characters are cartoons; the authors are intrusive puppet masters, the humour is savage, black, lacking charity.” That would be hard to improve on as a description of his own baggy monster (it could scarcely be baggier; it could not be more monstrous). He once published an anthology of essays and scripts called Museum Without Walls. Empty Wigs is a kind of unsettling sequel. A foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart, to say nothing of other organs even less welcome in polite society, it’s Meades’s black museum.

• Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades is published by Unbound (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply