Nasty, brutish & long.

My Name Is Legion 

By A. N. Wilson 

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $26, 496 pp.

A. N. Wilson is probably best-known in the United States for historical works like God's Funeral or The Victorians, biographies of C. S. Lewis and Tolstoy, or quirky studies of Paul and Jesus. He is less well known as a novelist, though the five-volume Lampitt Chronicles have garnered some attention, and quite unknown as a journalist. In England, I would wager, for everyone who has made it through all 750 pages of The Victorians, there are literally thousands who have read Wilson's columns in the Daily Telegraph or the Evening Standard. But maybe not for much longer. His latest and longest novel is a nasty, searing attack on Britain in general and the British press in particular, a satire of sorts in which it is awfully hard to find much, if any, redemption. I cannot imagine that Fleet Street is too happy with him right now.

Wilson has made a living out of the death of God. In My Name Is Legion, he transfers his attention to a kind of sprawling Dickensian canvas: London at the beginning of the new millennium, where Lennox Mark is trying to keep afloat his newspaper, Legion, amidst imminent financial collapse. Martina, his wife of many years (apparently an unconsummated relationship) has an ongoing lesbian affair of convenience with the awful editrix, Mary Much, and as the story opens they have enslaved a schizophrenic black youth named Peter, or is it Tuli? He, it transpires, may or may not be the illegitimate son of Mark. Or maybe of Fr. Vivyan Chell, Anglican ascetic, lecher, and revolutionary who runs a sort of Catholic Worker operation that seems somehow connected to a terrorist cell hoping to wreak havoc on behalf of the oppressed people of Zinariya, an African dictatorship propped up in part by the British government at the behest of Legion, upon which Mark depends for his financial survival.

As the story unfolds, Chell comes to hold center stage, and ominous forces gather to plot his downfall. Against this somewhat complex and not very necessary background, perhaps a nod in the direction of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, a wide range of lesser characters reinforce the point that the press is corrupt, political life is pretty corrupt too, the church is not what it seems to be, and good people are either in very short supply or not interesting enough to claim a place in the story. Certainly Chell has a kind of saintliness, albeit tempered--if that is the word--by uncontrollable lust, and others have some potential to grow into the condition of being interesting. The young and beautiful Legion employee, Rachel Pearl, who abandons journalism to work for the poor in Chell's shelter, is one such, a sort of Jewish searcher who, we are informed, didn't like to read Simone Weil. And Mercy and Lily d'Abo, the mother and grandmother of the schizophrenic Peter, are sympathetic characters, if not central to the story. But then, it isn't easy to see who is central to the story. Like most satirical novels, which this certainly seems to want to be, the characters are less important in themselves than they are as instruments in making a point. The point for Wilson seems to be the general awfulness of things.

This book makes me uneasy. It is not so much that the British press, or any press for that matter, does not richly deserve criticism for failures in integrity. We have long known in the United States that a free press does not always mean a responsible press. Nor is the problem that this book, so obviously a roman a clef, is more opaque for the American reader, who simply may not be able to understand it. I suspect that most Britishers who aren't personal friends of a journalist or two will be similarly disenfranchised. No, I think the problem is that if you are going to enjoy a novel, there has to be something or someone to like in its pages.

Satire works in one of two ways. It can succeed if the characters--at least some of them--are lovable while the target of the satire is justly skewered. And it may work if a largely unappealing cast are placed in service to gentle satire of an object which, despite the barbs, is something for which we retain a deal of real affection and a moiety of respect. Bleak House works so well because Dickens gives us a scorching attack on the stupidities of the Victorian legal system through the doings of people of depth and compassion, with whom we can take sides. Waugh's Scoop, on the other hand, incomparably funnier than My Name Is Legion, works because the fairly one-dimensional characters draw our attention to an institution that Waugh obviously sees to have some redeeming features. Wilson, I think, has made the mistake of assembling a mostly unpleasant crew to demonstrate the tawdry fatuity of English life at the turn of the century. He doesn't seem to like his characters. He has no concern for the press. And he is deeply disappointed in England's failure to be what England was, he thinks, in the not far distant past: a place of decency and honor and a kind of courage. It's very hard to like a book where there's nowhere to hang your hat, let alone leave your heart.

It may be, in the end, that a satirical novel turns into a plain old jeremiad. Legion in the title is a reference to Mark's hideous tabloid journal, xenophobic and jingoistic. But the reference to the other Mark, author of the Gospel, is also evident. The devils whom Jesus drives into the Gadarene swine are alive in the novel in the multiple personalities of the unfortunate Peter, who is never exorcised. Chell cannot do for Peter what Jesus did for the possessed man. God is probably dead, or at least away on extended vacation, and in the space left by the waning of faith there is only the legion of evil spirits. The book ends with a burgeoning new romance, but it is not a happy ending. Rather, it blows on the coals of the heart, as Archibald MacLeish might have said, offering the small postmodern solace of quiet domesticity, rather than the grandeur of a God who cares.

Paul Lakeland is the Aloysius P. Kelley, SJ, Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.