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.
