William Peter Blatty - Legion (Fontana, 1984.)
Blurb:
Eleven years ago The Gemini killer finished with his trail of death, leaving twenty-six mutilated bodies, all with a name beginning in 'K'.
Eleven years ago The Gemini had been hit with a rain of bullets when climbing the Golden Gate Bridge. His body was never found.
Now, as new victims fall, Detective Kinderman is faced with an impossible fact: the new Gemini could not be or have known about the old. When the exorcism was performed, the evil did not die.We’re all readers. And what is reading if not the manipulation of words? Words that mean one thing when standing alone, are altered and changed by the words around them. Brief pieces of connective tissue, such as "if", "and", and "the", string together more complex meanings until ideas are transformed from the mind of one and planted into the mind of another. It’s the very essence of why we read in the first place.
Coming to “Legion” immediately after reading the Exorcist, this is what came to my mind. If I had to ponder upon which character (or in truth characters) would carry over from the first book to the next, Lieutenant Kinderman would have been some way from the top of my list. He appears in the first novel, and while it wouldn’t be correct to say his was a minor role, you’d not call him the central focus either. On the other hand, The Exorcist is overcome by the author’s desire to shock, until many of us have forgotten what the book is truly about. But more on that later.
So, Kinderman is a cop. In Legion he is on the case of what appears to be a copy cat serial killer. However, to say this book is about a mysterious serial killer is a rather shameful slight of hand. This is easier to explain with reference to The Exorcist. Ask someone, just about anyone, what the Exorcist is about and you’ll hear something like “It’s about a young girl who gets possessed by a demon. It’s caused by Mike Oldfield.”
Okay, I added that bit about Mike Oldfield myself – but you get the gist. And yes, The Exorcist is indeed about a young girl who is possessed and does all kinds of unimaginable things to herself. However, like all good works of art, the book isn’t
only about that. In fact, when you read the novel you find quite a bit of philosophy, lots of talk about grief, loss, the nature of faith, aging. Indeed, the majority of the book is about these things, but it all gets lost because of the action; the events, are so outlandish, so shocking, that you kind of forget all that other stuff. It’s exciting, and over-excitement of the senses tends to make us forget many of the details – it all becomes one big wash of sensations.
However, with Legion – the professed “sequel” to The Exorcist - author William Peter Blatty pushes the central story of a copycat serial killer (or is it?) into the background. In fact it’s a long way back. It reappears at intervals infrequently, just when you begin to wonder if it’ll ever come back into the frame at all. Yet the cover blurb is adamant what the book is about, it uses words such as death, mutilated, bullets, exorcism. But don’t be fooled, these are the minor players on show here. Probably made it a better seller though.
Kinderman – our hero – is a man who is ill (emphysema) and is preparing to draw up his final accounts. A Jew, he wonders long about the nature of the world. Is there a God? Why does God allow evil to occur? What is the nature of evil? What is the probability of change? What happens after death? Where did the world come from? It’s all probabilities and possibilities, and every time he see’s a little light in the world it’s extinguished by time on the job – he works in homicide.
Time is short, and Kinderman knows it, not only for himself, but for everyone. And these questions become an intrinsic part of who he is, how he thinks and feels, and therefore how he goes about investigating his cases (the ultimate case, after all, is the creation of the Universe and Man.) As such Legion is a procedural book. But not a bog standard
police procedural, rather it’s a spiritual one. There are many references to studies from philosophers, doctors, scientists, and theologians, things that Kinderman ponders both periphery to the story at hand, and central to them. Each step of the way you’ll start thinking of these things too, even if you’re not wholly agreeing with him (such as in the case of the evolutionary path of reptiles eggs – but you’ll have to read the book to find out more on that). The point is –
this is what Legion is about,
this is the central theme that often overwhelms the more blatantly over-cooked pieces of the novel. And you can’t really miss it; you can’t avoid it, nor forget it. Legion isn’t, in this regard, the same as the Exorcist. In The Exorcist the different layers are torn asunder by the events in that bedroom over the stairs to M Street, but not so in Legion. The balance has changed quite considerably.
It is best to have read The Exorcist before you come to Legion. I have now read them both – back to back – and I can tell you from my standpoint that reading both definitely allows for some of the surprises and shocks to truly hit home. I won’t spoil any of them for you here. Suffice to say there are two specific instances I have in mind, and one of those was so shocking I actually stopped reading at that point and went to have a cup of tea, returning only after 30 minutes had passed. No exaggeration. So Legion really packs a wallop. It’s also fairly heavy reading.
As such it is sometimes interesting to ponder the nature of popular culture. Once you recognize it for what it is, you can spot the things that’ll bother the majority of people without thinking too hard. In the case of these two Blatty books the masses were helped out by cinema. Cinema can’t be bothered with all this introspective pondering – it usually requires the much maligned voiceover. No, cinema isn’t a book, the effect is different, the demands are different, the modus operandi alters and obscures the details, synthesizing them into titillating images (whirling cameras, panning shots, zooms, colour saturated night etc.) In truth, for those involved unconsciously with “popular culture” are best advised to seek out the movies (note that The Exorcist II movie is NOT based on Legion). Those who like their entertainment to fight back a bit, to have their brain stretched to ask the difficult questions, will want to start with the books. I’ll say this – if you’re only seen The Exorcist movies then you’ve not read the Exorcist books. Sounds obvious? Sure it is, but in the case of these works it’s doubly true, and in the books there is something else entirely going on, which is a surprise (and in reviews I’ve read has caused some to call a lot of the novel “boring”).
There are mysterious happenings here, of course. There are gruesome murders, plenty of evil, and a boatload of loss. So don’t think I’m saying the book isn’t a good read if you’re into possession stories, or even detective works. It might suit. However, these elements are merely the top blankets in a well made bed. And with winter coming on, don’t we all want to be tucked up nice and warm, to experience
every layer of our bedding?
So, Legion is a good book. Another
very good book from Blatty. It is in many ways the perfect sequel. Not only because it resurrects some familiar characters, but because I believe it might well tell the story the way Blatty might, on reflection, have liked The Exorcist to be. Or maybe with all the money and notoriety, he’d have changed nothing. I probably wouldn’t have!
Read this book. You really should. Double-bill it with The Exorcist. But if you don’t want to do that then fine, read it as a standalone. I just don’t think the impact will be quite the same.
To end I want to refer back to my first paragraph. Words. Our lead in Legion is Kinderman, and when I finished this book I thought about his name. Kind, Kinder. Kinder-man. A kinder man. Yes, that describes him perfectly. Yes, he
is a very kind man, a man whose soul is aching, faith is hardening, and his worries many. There is justice in him, right to his core. There is a kindness, a kindness to his fellow man as he takes those that stray from the path and brings them to justice in order to help the poor downtrodden victims to cleanse themselves. He discovers the importance and value of being kind, intrinsically kind. As the book moves on – carrying on from The Exorcist where he performs another cleansing act on Regan et al – he becomes an even
kinder man.
But Faith? God? Demons? Satan? Good and Evil? Our challenges are many, our potential for failure legion.
