Fiction/History: Perhaps it is time to give London a break from "savage satire", as the blurb of My Name Is Legion dubs A.N. Wilson's latest novel.
In the current apocalyptic context, when even the city's ever-popular, newt-fancying mayor, Ken Livingstone, says a terrorist attack is inevitable, and commentators speculate that it will be "the big one", London readers may lack the appetite for Wilson invective at this length. Through his regular columns in the Evening Standard, however, his opinions will be familiar to them. For years his words have been a distraction during the endless hours spent by millions of commuters on the geriatric Tube trains that have so far posed more of a threat to them than al-Qaeda.
Wilson is a prolific and accomplished writer, with several dozen works of fiction and biography to his name (Jesus, Tolstoy and St Paul have been among his subjects), as well as his journalism. It is no surprise then that he has now published two books (one fiction, the other history) within a month of each other - and on this evidence he is better suited to being London's biographer than its satirist.
In fact, Wilson doesn't really do "savage" in the same way as near-contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Will Self might be said to. For all his anger and disgust, his tone is more measured than theirs, and a note of fogey-ish nostalgia is discernible beneath his account of the "stinking, corrupted" society one of his characters refers to.
Still, it is clear from the start that Wilson has high ambitions for My Name Is Legion. The way he sets up the elements of conflict is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, with the main characters quickly introduced and a broad canvas sketched out.
At one extreme is Father Vyvyan Chell, an Anglican cleric driven to violent measures by his fury at the political situation in Zinariya, aAfrican former colony where he was once a missionary; at the other is the gluttonous Lennox Marx, proprietor of the failing Legion group of tabloids which is sustained only by Zinariyan mineral rights, granted in return for the newspapers' support of the country's brutal dictator. Apart from the Zinariyan connection and an anxiety about whether or not God exists, Chell and Marx have something else in common: both have been lovers of black Londoner Mercy Topling and either could be the father of her disturbed son Peter, the chaotic consciousness at the heart of the novel. Abused by his social worker and exiled from the family home by his depressed stepfather, the good-looking Peter is possessed by the diverse voices and impulses of the London streets he walks, lethally, in search of an identity ("What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many").
Peter's fragmented nature could have been an interesting device, but in fact the voices of his "demons" are used for little more than one-liners, and his violence and ultimate fate lack resonance. The same is true of Chell, the flawed cleric caught between political righteousness and personal lust; his haughty Anglican woolliness makes his bomb-strewn schemes seem implausible.
Wilson has most fun with his easiest target, the tabloid press, where the grotesques who run the Legion group change editorial direction from hour to hour according to whim, personal viciousness and political advantage. Among them is the master of the "why oh why?" column, L.P. Watson, whose name echoes that of his creator and who is, for good measure, irritatingly irresistible to beautiful women. Life at the Legion is enjoyably described, but the in-jokes will be lost on most readers and the pair of well-meaning hacks-turned-do-gooders offered up at the end as hope for the future are too pallid to convince.
Dedicated to Peter Ackroyd, whose series about London is currently on BBC2, Wilson's London: A Short History is less weighty and more engaging than My Name is Legion. Wilson does have points to make about what has happened to the modern capital (what he refers to as "Silly London") but he doesn't let them spoil the flow of his tale.
Starting with the panoramic view from Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, he charts, at pace, the growth, layer upon layer, of a one-bridge Roman town of 25,000 people into the teeming cosmopolis of today. As each era superimposes itself on the ones before, he conjures up the vanished human history, hidden like the rivers flowing beneath, that is so much part of London's atmosphere. This sense of some essence preserved beneath each wave of destruction and reconstruction somewhat undermines Wilson's thesis that "Silly London" signals an irrevocable change, producing a "peculiar mixture of angst and idleness" among its population, who have (with the decline of the docks and manufacturing and the internationalisation of the City of London) no "real work" to do, other than cashing in on whatever bits of property they may be lucky enough to own.
For the pattern that emerges, through each successive phase of invasion, migration, fire, plague, war and Blitz, is one of renewal. There is always an equilibrium between dynamism and inertia: the huge anti-war demonstrations that were ignored last year echoed similar moments stretching back to the Peasants' Revolt, with large numbers of people gathering together to make demands, then dispersing and waiting quietly for decades or centuries for their aims to be achieved.
Wilson has found some interesting and little-known stories, such as the one about the 1846 battle between hundreds of English and Irish labourers building the railways in Camden Town, which proved entirely beyond the capacity of the newly-formed Metropolitan Police to control. (With the Famine starting in Ireland, the Irish, who were sending money home, found their work had been taken over by the English.) Because of this defeat, a staggering total of 85,000 special constables was drafted in to intimidate Chartist demonstrators two years later during Europe's year of revolutions. So it may have been the fault of a handful of Irish labourers that the English had to wait a further 70 years for universal suffrage.
In the end, despite his disquiet at London's growing inequality, at its environmental and infrastructural problems, at the plans of the largely powerless Livingstone, and at such follies as the Dome, Wilson is persuaded by the great city's sheer energy and human diversity (which ultimately breeds tolerance) to come to an optimistic conclusion about its future.
Plenty more opportunities for savage satire then.
• Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist