Tabloid hell

At the reception after his wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, Britain’s Prince Charles -- not very classily but, in light of his own experience, understandably -- is said to have exclaimed, “Down with the press!” Perhaps it was not the most appropriate remark to be emanating from the heir to the throne of a nation proud of its heritage of free expression. These days many Americans also seem to distrust or dislike the press. But to understand just where British novelist, biographer and journalist A.N. Wilson is coming from in his vehemently satirical portrait of a nefarious tabloid known as the Daily Legion, it may be helpful to recall that when it comes to unabashedly sensationalistic journalism, the British have us well and truly beat.

Newspapers such as Wilson’s fictional Daily Legion may look a lot like the scandal sheets found on American supermarket checkout stands, but insofar as they purvey actual news, national and international, they wield a far greater influence on public opinion. Another important factor distinguishing them from their American counterparts is that working for them is much more lucrative. In America, unless you’re on television, journalism is not a high-paying field. Not so in Britain, which is why we might find an otherwise thoughtful, sensitive, high-minded person like Wilson’s young Rachel Pearl serving as the arts editor of a tabloid that she knows to be trashy.

“The world’s changed,” as she explains to her colleague Sinclo Manners, a mild-mannered, decent and loyal young man secretly and hopelessly in love with her. “Money is a very simple way of codifying value.” The fact that Rachel works for the Legion makes Sinclo feel less bad about doing so himself.

Rachel, in turn, similarly looks up to her senior colleague -- and lover -- columnist L.P. Watson, who once wrote fine poetry and prizewinning travel books.

Although in Rachel’s infatuated eyes, L.P. still has the allure of an important literary figure, his clear-eyed wife mourns his fate as a “fallen archangel.” Theological allusions abound in this novel, starting with its very title: a reference to the New Testament episode in which Jesus frees a madman from the unclean spirits that torment him. Jesus’ question “What is thy name?” elicits the reply, “My name is Legion: for we are many.” Wilson offers a modern-day version of this chilling malady in the character of Peter d’Abo, a handsome but extremely disturbed 16-year-old of uncertain parentage afflicted with multiple-personality disorder. Not even Peter’s mother is certain who his father is, but one likely suspect is the unprincipled, ultramanipulative, power-drunk, vindictive proprietor of the Daily Legion, Lennox Mark.

The Legion itself is portrayed as a monstrous, Hydra-headed destroyer of souls, not merely of those who work there but of all who read it and all who are unlucky enough to be defamed in it. The paper’s chief target is Father Vivyan Chell, a charismatic soldier-turned-Anglican monk, who has made it his life’s mission to fight on behalf of the poor and oppressed of Africa.

The obese, greedy Lennox and the aristocratic, ascetic Father Vivyan serve as the novel’s twin poles and, as is often the case with opposites, they are linked to each other in unexpected ways. Lennox grew up in colonial Africa, the scion of a mega-rich mining family in the fictitious country of Lugardia, now Zinariya. For a brief period in his teens, his heart was touched by meeting Father Vivyan, who opened his eyes to the poverty and misery around him. Even now, in middle age, Lennox obsessively ropes his hapless employees into endless discussions of whether God exists.

Lennox’s altruism was exceedingly short-lived, however, even by modern-day standards. While Father Vivyan has unwaveringly continued to support the overthrow of corrupt and tyrannical governments, Lennox’s fortune comes from Zinariya’s copper mines and the mutually supportive arrangement he has worked out with the African dictator Gen. Joshua Bindiga. Beneath all the scandal, gossip and trivialities it dispenses, the Daily Legion’s mission is to champion Bindiga and discredit his critics.

Ironically, Father Vivyan too once championed Bindiga in the latter’s early days as an anticolonial freedom fighter. But since then, he’s seen the light and denounces the heinous regime at every opportunity.

Incorruptible himself (or close to it), Father Vivyan embraces a Christianity that has little to do with pacifism, nonviolence or turning the other cheek: “Father Vivyan Chell worshipped a Soldier Christ who came to bring not peace but a sword. It was for this priest a simple blasphemy to claim to worship the Incarnate Christ, but to hinder the coming of His Kingdom by supporting wickedness and selfishness.” Father Vivyan believes in taking action, even violent action, to achieve justice. “[I]f an assassin killed Bindiga now ... “ he tells Lennox, “they’d be doing God’s work.”

In portraying the clash between these two forces, Wilson depicts one as dangerously flawed but the other as purely evil. Nor is Lennox Mark the sole agent of corruption: He is abetted by a wife even more hardhearted than he, while she, in turn, works in tandem with an ultrachic media maven more cynical and underhanded than both of them put together.

Furiously and feverishly, Wilson plunges us into the depths of a world of horrifying shallowness in an appallingly recognizable portrait of a culture gone mad. Yet there is something else unsettling about this book, not merely the “bad news” it conveys but something in its tone, its stance and its general atmosphere. The tone of the proceedings veers wildly, not only from scene to scene but even within a single paragraph. The story line is over-rich, a veritable witch’s brew of undigested ingredients. One feels that Wilson may have set out to dissect a lamentable state of chaos and confusion but that, in the end, the novel he wrote reflects it as well.