From 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.
Agent, Gillon Aitken.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* 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.
Allison BlockCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
