A.N. Wilson: My Name Is Legion

Reviewed by STEPHANIE JOHNSON

A.N. Wilson is an English writer who is perhaps better known in this part of the world for his biographies, although his novels have collected various prizes. Lives he has written about include those of Sir Walter Scott, C.S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch, the latter causing as much controversy as his earlier take on Saint Paul.

My Name is Legion is a weighty satire on modern Britain with a large cast of characters drawn from the full spectrum of the class-system. Central is Vivyan Chell, a complex and memorable personality. Once a soldier, but for many years an Anglican monk, Chell has spent most of his life in a fictional African nation called Zanariya.

As the book opens, Chell is dying and a small, angry fat man called Lennox Mark is trying to gain access to the monastery. In short, filmic grabs, Wilson introduces us to the many characters who have brought Chell to his final moments.

Lennox is the hugely wealthy owner of a rag called The Daily Legion, his fortune made from the inhumane copper mines of Zanariya, his wife Martina is a face-stretched, bisexual Knightsbridge matron who takes in a young Black psychotic called Peter as a houseboy. Peter's long-suffering mother Mercy was once Chell's lover — who despite his vows (or perhaps because of them) is one highly sexed monk. Father Chell engenders love in nearly everyone who meets him, male or female.

The reader loves him, too, but he is the only one who is even likeable. The writing of satire is a kind of balancing act — on one hand the author has his political barrow to push, on the other he must create characters that are three-dimensional. Otherwise he runs the risk of writing a kind of prose cartoon, where characters exist only to push the plot along and represent one element, in this case, an element of British society.

In Wilson's book too many characters
suffer these limitations. He makes jabs at the church, the media, racial tensions, marriage and sexuality, Britain's economic relationship with ex-colonies and the class system.

It is likely there are many in-jokes that Londoners would appreciate more than we're able. This is yet another book that permeates the iron curtain that hangs somewhere near the equator, a membrane that allows many books of such dubious quality on to our limited market, but does not allow our equivalent on to the shelves in Britain. A satire on New Zealand society — now why on earth would Britons want to read that?

Hutchinson, $54.95

* Stephanie Johnson's The Shag Incident won the Deutz Medal in 2003.