My Name Is Legion (novel)

Vivyan is suspended from the parish, his reputation as a 20th-century saint is immediately destroyed, and ardent devotees such as Lily d'Abo, believing everything the papers say, are devastated.

16 years of age, he is the illegitimate son of Mercy Topling, an office worker who, due to her then promiscuous lifestyle, honestly cannot say who Peter's father is—either one of a number of journalists from The Daily Legion where she was employed when she became pregnant in 1985, or Lennox Mark himself, the proprietor of that paper.

However, it could also be Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk who lived and worked in Africa but with whom she had a spontaneous and illicit sexual encounter while he was visiting her parish church in Crickleden.

Now married with two younger boys, who do not get along with their older brother, Mercy Topling senses that her son Peter, who has been playing truant of late, is not well and may even be dangerous to others but does not do much about it except consult Kevin Currey, the local social worker.

Lennox Mark, the owner of The Daily Legion, was brought up in the (fictitious) African country of Zinariya, where he got to know, and was taught to distinguish right from wrong, by Father Vivyan, a man 15 years his senior.

Although he had discovered his spirituality there, after moving to England and taking over The Daily Legion, Mark's faith was superseded by greed, gluttony, and other signs of a thoroughly capitalistic view of the world.

Having forged a successful alliance with General Bindiga, the dictator of Zinariya, and publicly supporting him through his paper in spite of blatant human rights violations in that country, Mark has seemingly stopped listening to his conscience altogether.

Mark's wife Martina is a former East German prostitute now, after rewriting her own biography, posing as the daughter of a Swiss surgeon who, during the Second World War, helped the victims of Nazi Germany without taking money for it.

For example, 28-year-old Rachel Pearl, an intellectual and well educated young woman, did not mind, when she was still at university, becoming the lover of a much older journalist and getting a well-paid job through his connections.

When, on the death of her former schoolmate and socialite Kitty Chell, Rachel realises the sheer amount of manipulation going on in the media—Kitty died of natural causes in the first stages of pregnancy, but The Daily Legion turns it into a scandalous drug-related death—she quits both her job and her lover and benefactor.

As a young man he joined the army and fought in Zinariya, but his conversion was complete, he became a monk and went back to Africa to live and work there for almost 40 years.

As a radical follower of Jesus Christ, he advocates absolute poverty and does not have any personal belongings himself except a few books, among them his favourites, Bonhoeffer's Ethik and works by Simone Weil.

Like Bonhoeffer, Vivyan has been pondering the question of whether it is ethically justifiable, and a fulfilment of God's plan, to use violence against those in power who are evil—whether they are a British newspaper tycoon or an African dictator butchering his own people.

You could have the whole Third Reich with all its power and all its deadly attractiveness designed to tell you that it was a good thing to send a child to a gas oven; but every single person on this planet would know that it was evil.