Vanity Fair with a vicious 味方する ...
Stephen Glover
Last updated at 00:00 02 April 2004
MY NAME IS LEGION
By A.N. Wilson
(Hutchinson, 続けざまに猛撃するs 16.99)
THIS ambitious novel by A.N. Wilson will be deconstructed by sophisticates who may see in it a rather spiteful roman a clef. Surely the character of Mary Much, a sexy and capricious magazine editor, might be familiar to denizens of medialand?
Mary 作品 for the disgusting and corrupt newspaper proprietor Lennie 示すs.
Do we know him?
His enormous girth and gargantuan appetite for caviar would seem to point to Robert Maxwell as a model, and yet Lennie has an 利益／興味 in theology which the former 不名誉d 圧力（をかける） baron surely did not 株.
Do we recognise ツバメ, Lennie's wife, and Mary Much's の近くに friend and 時折の lover? ツバメ is also a 新聞記者／雑誌記者 who 令状s 極端に opinionated pieces for her husband's popular newspaper, the Daily Legion. It would certainly be possible to draw 平行のs with a real person, but ツバメ takes on a life of her own.
Mr Wilson's novel is compared by its publicists withTom Wolfe's Bonfire Of The Vanities. Its first inspiration is surely Thackeray's Vanity Fair. With brilliantly inventive, if いつかs わずかに implausible plotting, Mr Wilson's satiric work 範囲s across the whole of modern London, from Lennie 示すs' luxurious Knightsbridge home to the grim 会議 広い地所s south of the Thames.
The link is Peter, a psychopathic young man with a 多重の personality disorder who いつかs thinks he is a sex maniac 殺し屋 and いつかs behaves like Bertie Wooster's Jeeves. Peter's psychiatric social 労働者 is a paedophile, and this makes Peter violently homophobic.
He does something revoltingly unpleasant - there is a lot of stomach-churning stuff in this 調書をとる／予約する - to a homosexual gossip columnist who 作品 on the Daily Legion.
Peter's paternity is in question. Is his father Lennie, who seduced his sexpot West Indian mother, Mercy, when she was a 長官 on the Daily Legion? Or coul d it be Father Vivyan Chell, an aristocratic ex-Army hero turned militantly 社会主義者 修道士? Lennie and Vivyan are old enemies, though they were once 簡潔に friends.
Peter is a not an 完全に 納得させるing character. Lennie is a onedimensional buffoon, and his wife, ツバメ, a cardboard 削減（する）-out bitch.
Mary Much, though 高度に amusing, is only sketched. The three of them - Peter is different - are butts of Mr Wilson's dyspeptic pen. They are 犠牲者s of satire, and satire tends to 減ずる and 簡単にする.
The characters who come alive, and move us, are those whom Mr Wilson likes, and who perhaps have no models in the real world - Mercy and her pious mother, Lily; and, above all, Father Chell, who believes that Christ （機の）カム to this world to save the poor and 非難する the rich. The once 恐らく Rightwing Mr Wilson seemingly 株 these 見解（をとる）s.
Those characters with 力／強力にする and money are without exception disagreeable.
Though Mr Wilson gives us a romantic ending - two former 新聞記者／雑誌記者s on the Daily Legion find peace with each other - this is a very 荒涼とした novel, far more so than Vanity Fair. It is a portrait of a decayed and rotten society that is no longer 価値（がある） defending. One cannot help thinking that Mr Wilson identifies with Father Chell, the aristocratic former Army officer who won an MC, turned to God and became a 天罰（を下す） of materialism.
Father Chell finally 反映するs that the 'decent, 勇敢に立ち向かう good place of his childhood - that place which fought for the underdog, and stuck up for liberty and 司法（官） in Europe - now seemed a mean, ugly little 詐欺 of a place'. Modern life may make 過激なs of us all.
Mr Wilson has indeed written a 乱すing and 高度に 初めの novel.
