A Portrait of London
By Kelly Jane Torrance
All eyes have been on London this month. One could do worse than eschew the newspaper columns and magazine think pieces and look to a novel for a veritable portrait of one of the world’s great cities.
A.N. Wilson’s My Name Is Legion (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is a sweeping examination of modern Britain. The prolific historian and journalist knows his stuff. And in this, his 18th novel, he shows an ambition that has become rare in contemporary literature.
The Legion of the title is not just The Daily Legion, a London tabloid of the worst kind. In the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus encounters a man possessed by demons. When Jesus commands the spirit to leave the man, and asks its name, the man replies, “My name is Legion: For we are many.”
That could be a clue that the characters of the novel are not a savory bunch. But it’s also a more direct reference to the center of the book, 15-year-old Peter d’Abo. Peter is schizophrenic and slowly descending into madness. He not only hears voices in his head—he becomes their personalities. Wilson cleverly uses this device to increase the cast, introducing us to even more typical British characters. Jeeves is added to the list after Peter listens to one of his stepfather’s books on tape. Peter’s switch, in an instant, from a murdering, sexually-perverted thug, to Wodehouse’s celebrated butler, is darkly funny.
Peter’s black mother is the sensual, working-class—but intelligent—Mercy Topling (her name is one of many Dickensian touches). The white father could be one of four men—Lennox Mark, proprietor of The Daily Legion, where Mercy used to work; L.P. Watson, one of the paper’s most popular columnists (and sometimes like the author, in more than just name); a nameless former sports reporter for the Legion; or Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk with whom Mercy had a single tryst.
Besides Victorian novelists, My Name Is Legion also owes something to Evelyn Waugh, whose Scoop also focused on sensationalistic journalism and Africa. Lennox Mark hails from the former colony of Zinariya, a fictional African nation, and his wealth comes not from his newspapers, which bleed money, but from his partnership with the murderous dictator, General Bindiga. Father Chell also spent most of his life in Zinariya, and spends the novel campaigning against Bindiga’s human rights abuses and Mark’s support for the regime.
Mark was, for one brief summer, a protégé of Chell’s: “That adolescent encounter beneath the great brooding brick church of the Holy Redeemer was something which Lennox Mark had been trying to forget for his entire life.” His aristocratic father soon put a stop to it, but Mark’s early belief in God has never left him. He spends the novel alternately trying to destroy Chell by falsely accusing him of pederasty in his newspaper and trying to find someone who can convince him that God doesn’t exist—and thus ease his conscience.
As the novel opens, Chell lays dying in a monastery, accused of horrendous crimes—terrorist activity and the sexual abuse and murder of a minor. A bomb has just killed General Bindiga on a state visit to England. Another intended for The Daily Legion has been diffused. Two women—at least one of whom seems to have had an affair with the monk—tend to his needs. In the rest of the novel, we discover how events came to such a disastrous end.
Chell is a fascinating figure. “Father Vivyan Chell worshipped a Solider Christ who came to bring not peace but a sword,” Wilson writes. “That was why, when Akule told Father Vivyan that he had received another e-mail, recounting a successful blast in the [Zinariyan] mines, the monk said a quick prayer for the souls of those slain, and thanked the Soldier Christ in his heart.”
Here the author has yet another debt—with the inveterate sinner priest; Wilson almost out-Greenes Graham Greene. Wilson is a religious skeptic who once planned a life in the Church of England, and his novel, like many of Greene’s, are suffused with religion. But it’s a lot harder to guess Wilson’s views on the subject than Greene’s.
It’s the same with his politics. As in all good satire, no one is spared. The do-gooder young Jewish atheist intellectual is just as much of a target as the devout Anglo-Catholic West Indian grandmother. The left-wing priest is just as flawed as the exploitative newspaper baron. Wilson writes of the Legion’s politics, “The Good Guys, paradoxically, were those who had in fact done most to erode the 1950s England of Esmé’s imagination: the Good Guys politically were the right-wing Americans, and the big multinational companies. The Bad Guys were the European Union, the sexual liberals, the would-be abolishers of the pound and the Bureaucrats.” He skewers them all.
Some of the objects of his satire are a bit dated—modern art installations, for example. But he can be piercingly funny, and, unlike so many, combines his pointing finger with a real love for his country:
He knew that terrible things had been done by the British Army, and by the British Empire, with its Amritsar massacres and its battles of Omdurman and its atrocities during the Boer War. He nonetheless believed that these aberrations, terrible as they were, were not to be compared with the horrors perpetrated by the Russians or the Germans on their own people, and on others. When the great test came (will you resist Hitler or will you let him take over the world?) there was one nation, and only one nation, in the whole world who answered unequivocally that they would go on fighting… In Vivyan Chell’s lifetime, the British armed forces, in an overwhelming proportion of instances, had been used to defend the defenceless, to resist tyranny, to stand up for that which was good against evil.
It’s because of this love that Chell is so angry. “That decent, brave, good place of his childhood—that place which fought for the underdog, and stuck up for liberty and justice in Europe—now seemed a mean, ugly, filthy little fraud of a place,” he thinks. “England had not been taken over by some alien ideology of Stalinism or Nazism. It had simply died and gone rotten.”
Wilson’s book is a Victorian novel for the current century, teeming with characters from all walks of life who are remarkably authentic. (How does this 50-something man of letters capture so well London’s underclass?) At times, the cast may overwhelm, and some characters are all but dropped partway through, their fates not quite satisfyingly known.
But one only cares because this is by no means just a political book, or one only of interest to Britons. Wilson’s sad and funny novel reminds us of the imperfectability of humanity and, in the end, the saving grace of love.
Kelly Jane Torrance is TAE Online’s books columnist.
