A wickedly savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain, doing for today what Evelyn Waugh did for the thirties and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities did for the eighties.

“Had Father Vivyan been killed by his own pride and fanaticism; by his belief that he could ‘save’ a dangerous and mentally unstable boy? Had he been killed by his own fanatical political posture, his alliance with those whom the rest of the world saw as terrorists?… Or had he been destroyed by the right wing press, and in particular by Lennox Mark, the proprietor of the Legion? Perhaps by a bit of all these things…”

“So it was that within minutes of Father Vivyan’s soul leaving his body and soaring to God alone knows where… The silence of that religious house was broken… They could hear the coarse accents of Lennie Mark shouting, ‘Don’t you realize — you CUNT — don’t you realize who I FUCKING am?’”

A.N. Wilson has written a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain — its press, its politics, its Church, its rich, its underclass. His London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, randy, money-obsessed and haunted by strange gods.