My Name is Legion
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Bonfire of the Vanities for contemporary London
From A. N. Wilson, the renowned historian and novelist, comes a stunningly bold new work of fiction set in the darkly glamorous media world. Wilson's London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, lustful, money-obsessed, and haunted by strange gods.
The Daily Legion is a rag that peddles celebrity gossip and denounces asylum seekers. The secret is that its financial survival depends on the support of a brutal African government. Recklessly defending this corrupt dictatorship, the newspaper faces off against Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk and missionary who is working to overthrow the corrupt regime. They wage a smear campaign against the priest. Freedom fighters join the battle. Violence escalates.
Called "a big, broad, sweeping book, as disturbing as it is funny" by The Guardian, My Name Is Legion is a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain-its press, its politics, its church, its rich, its underclass. At times shocking, at times tragic, it is a provocative take on present-day England, delivering both delicious fun and acid social commentary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
