My Name is Legion

"Wilson's career has followed several paths over the course of 30 previous books, from novelist to historian to noted British journalist, and he puts them all to good use in this sprawling comedy of ideas that gleefully skewers the newspaper business and just about everything else."—Gregory Cowles, The New York Times Book Review

"Possibly [Wilson's] best . . . My Name Is Legion takes its place among such recent distinguished examples of London novels as Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday. Like them it is memorable for the unceasing, unceasingly active verbal life informing each and every one of its pages. It is also one more instance of the variety of challenging books—novels, biography, history—A. N. Wilson has given us over his nearly 30 years of steady work with the pen."—William H. Pritchard, Chicago Tribune

"[Wilson] grapples with the concerns both of the heart and the intellect and [the book] is grippingly readable."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Profoundly sobering, yet side-splittingly funny . . . brave and satisfying."—The Boston Globe

"Wilson never misses the mark. . . . It's a testament to the multivalent nature of Wilson's talent that he can portray this frightening family so tenderly in a novel that usually flashes with steely wit."—The Washington Post Book World

"[A] precise and piercing satire . . . It's Wilson's characters, though, that give the book its depth, all fully drawn, none escaping his sharp sword."—Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Loathsome media mogul Lennox Mark owns the fictional British tabloid The Daily Legion, a bastion of celebrity gossip and gratuitous sleaze. The paper has its own dirty little secret: it's funded by the corrupt African government of Zinariya, whose ruthless leader employs slave labor in his cocoa plantations and copper mines. Enter Vivyan Chell, a British-born monk whose missionary work in Zinariya exposed him to the country's nefarious ways. When Father Chell, now a parish priest in England, voices his objections to the paper and its backers, Lennox Mark enlists a boy named Peter to disparage the Father's name. Alas, the reader knows something neither the monk nor the magnate do: both men had affairs with Peter's mother, and either might be Peter's father. Wilson, a Brit whose more than 30 books include nonfiction on Jesus and C. S. Lewis, serves up multiple plots and blistering barbs that bore holes in every page. The novel's most compelling character is Peter, who grapples with multiple personalities (including Jeeves and Bertie Wooster) that play like a satirical soundtrack of British popular culture. Tom Wolfe meets Evelyn Waugh in this portrayal of modern-day England as a place of shame and blame, where even the pious have a penchant for the perverse."—Booklist (starred review)

"Readers who treasure Evelyn Waugh's nasty 1938 comic masterpiece Scoop (and we are legion) will rejoice to find it reborn in the tireless British author's saber-toothed 18th novel. A superbly sleazy Fleet Street rag, The Legion—surely inspired by Waugh's Daily Beast—wages war on truth, justice and its publisher Lennox 'Lennie' Mark's many, many enemies. Chief among them is former army officer turned radical Anglican priest Vivyan Chell, from whose deathbed the tale of The Legion's crimes and its minions' messily intertwined lives begins to unfold. Father Vivyan's adventures in political sabotage have undermined the misrule of moribund African nation Zariya's thuggish General Bindinga—the ill-gotten gains from whose atrocities provide The Legion's primary financial support. Variously involved co-conspirators and observers include failed poet and all-purpose columnist L.P. Watson (certainly we may be forgiven for detecting just a hint of A.N. Wilson in him); his gossipy confidante, Mary Mulch, editor of the superslick Gloss; still-idealistic arts editor Rachel Pearl and the several males (including L.P.) who admire her journalistic and other chops; Lennie Mark's bisexual Euro-trash wife Martina (a wonderful caricature: too bad the middle-aged Lotte Lenya isn't around to portray her); West Indian beauty Mercy d'Abo, and her emotionally disturbed biracial bastard teenaged son Peter, whose schizophrenic outbursts have much to do with this busy story's precipitous pitch forward into hell. My Name is Legion (whose wry title nicely suggests its satanic content) is an all-out, take-no-prisoners encyclopedic satire, which may push rather more buttons than it needs to (even the Queen takes her lumps,in a memorably snotty aside). But it plays fair, finding genuine heroism in those (notably Father Chell) who oppose The Legion's reductive trashings and otherwise subtly celebrating the political, religious and artistic standards from which it has so egregiously fallen. Malicious fun, with a very keen edge. Wilson's most abrasively entertaining yet."—Kirkus Reviews

"Wilson's latest novel is like a medieval gargoyle set on an outhouse—the elegance and elaboration of its malignancy is in dramatic disproportion to the value of the object it graces. Said object is the Daily Legion, a British tabloid run by a magnate of exemplary wickedness, Lennox Mark, who hails from a former African colony now run by a General Bindiga. Mark's wealth derives from his "silent partnership" with Bindiga in slave-labor copper mines and cocoa plantations. If Mark is the Mark of the Beast in this novel, goodness is represented by Father Vivyan Chell, a Thomas Merton–ish character whose mission in Bindiga's Zinariya acquainted him with Bindiga's grievous misrule. Now back in London, Chell is planning some possibly violent protest upon Bindiga's upcoming visit to England. To disable Chell, Mark employs a boy named Peter d'Abo to accuse him of pederasty. Unbeknownst to Chell and Mark is that Peter is a link between the two of them: both had flings with his mother, and either could be his father. Peter's mind is a cacophony of voices, a parody of English pop culture: he is literally possessed. Wilson triangulates between the poisonous office politics of the Legion, the trail of Peter's madness and Chell's frustration with an England that has become ‘a pointless, amoral cauldron of putrescence.' The dreadful, scheming vitality of Wilson's characters richly rewards the persistent reader."—Publishers Weekly