Book Review: Legion

Years ago, I read two of the most horrific works of fiction ever written about Washington. Worse than (the candidate you most oppose)'s campaign biography, even. William Peter Blatty's Exorcist and its sequel, Legion, are horror stories. At least The Exorcist is a horror story; Legion qualifies as another one, but in Legion the diplomat-turned-novelist seemed to be trying to explain what he really believed about the Christian theological concepts his fiction exploited. Anyway I said this web site would never sell The Exorcist, because (I grew up with the various violations of taboos that made the movie so controversial, but) I could not endorse even a fictional depiction of anyone giving a child that much of those drugs. Right. But I did sell Legion, despite having better books by Arab-American authors including Blatty's presumably nonfiction memoir, and here's the review.

Title: Legion

Author: William Peter Blatty

Date: 1983

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: none

Length: 248 pages

Quote: "He stared at the sun coming up behind the Capitol, streaking the Potomac with orange light, and then down at the outrage."

Twelve years after the end of The Exorcist, surviving characters see a new outbreak of horrific senseless murders. And who's doing them? Physical evidence found on one victim seems to implicate a little old lady. A neurologist with a brain tumor sees and meets his double, which became a harbinger of death, according to superstition, because it's an hallucination associated with the kind of cancer that's killing Dr. Amfortas. Some of the murders involve medications in use in a psychiatric hospital, where one of the doctors is definitely an evil person, but is he a murderer? And then, deep inside the maximum-security psychiatric unit in the hospital...

Blatty, a Christian Arab-American, focussed on the Jesuits at Georgetown University in The Exorcist; the main protagonist, Father Karras, reacted to the satanic murders as a Catholic priest. Readers undoubtedly remember what happened to him. In Legion the main protagonist, Bill Kinderman, is Jewish, with a cosmopolitan philosophy, a snarky sense of humor, and a tendency to use a wider Yiddish vocabulary than the average American has...and a philosophical preparation for the idea that what he thought for all this time had happened to Karras just might have happened to someone else.

Although its ending is in some ways less horrific, and its medical science is less outrageously wrong, Legion is still a sequel to The Exorcist. It's not meant to be a pleasant read, not even an enjoyably scary "Aren't you glad such things don't really exist?" sort of horror story. Sadistic, satanic, serial murders do exist. Evil, as well as good, lurks in the hearts of men (and women) in the real world, as in the world of these novels.

What you'll like, if you read this book at all: the sense of place, Kinderman's philosophical musings, that making a movie of this one wouldn't require a child to act out things children shouldn't know about.

What some readers will love, and some will hate: Legion is literary fiction. It starts out like a detective story, but doesn't follow the rules for one. I've toyed with the idea of writing a detective story where the murderer is clever enough to use different methods. Legion goes further outside the rules than that.

What you probably won't like: it's about evil. Evil is banal. Fictional murders are tedious reading.

If you want to read a novel that takes you back, mentally, to dear old D.C., Legion will do that, and the fact that most of the bad things happen in snooty old pay-more-for-less, rather-be-killed-in-city-traffic-than-risk-outsiders-coming-in-by-Metro Georgetown might be considered a plus point. (Contractors who commute all over the Metropolitan Area fantasize about bad things happening to Georgetown.)

In a way, despite having a Jewish protagonist, Legion can be considered a Christian book. So could The Exorcist--although in my judgment it was a bad one, and when a bookseller rates a book too bad to be resold at a profit, it's very bad indeed. In a way Legion might be considered a palinode, a retraction of some things Blatty seemed to be saying in The Exorcist about the nature of good and evil.

His views of good and evil are, however, his own. They're not the doctrine of the Church. They're not heresies; they're just the musings of an individual Christian, as distinct from the doctrine of Christianity. At the end of Legion Blatty seems to have reached the point of saying what I often say about "devils" or "demons": I don't claim to know that such creatures exist in any "real" or personal sense, but some human behavior can only be rationally explained by postulating some sort of Evil Principle. Blatty goes further: In the Bible a person suffering from the kind of painful self-destructive insanity then identified as "a devil" says to Jesus, channelling the man's "devil" or devils, "Our name is Legion, for we are many." Blatty locates the "many devils" within humans. Kinderman asserts toward the end that "we," including Kinderman, "are Legion."

Well, yes, ultimately...Churches I attended called the sort of points most Christians concede to the Evil Principle a matter of temptation not possession. If evil "possesses" Charles Manson enough to make him delight in murder, it's lucky to get as far, with most of us, as suggesting "Someone else will take care of your job." There are, however, Christians who think it's generally healthy to remind people that keeping a library book a day overdue might be genuinely uncharitable (whether anyone else has shown any interest in that book in the past ten years, or not) and the thought "Lots of people keep library books overdue" might come directly from the Evil Principle. Other Christians concede that this may be true but think it's an uncharitable, unhelpful thing to say...and some Christians get into debates that generate heat rather than light, and Blatty goes home and writes Legion.

It's not a Christian book.There must be more edifying Christian books to read.