Word: waine
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...years. It is, necessarily, a modest affair compared with the immense Constable show at the Tate Gallery in 1976, which was the kind of exhibition that defines the image of an artist for a generation. Many favorites are not here, starting with The Hay Wain, the most reproduced landscape in English painting-a sort of vegetative Mona Lisa. But the show was curated by the world's leading Constable specialist, Graham Reynolds, formerly of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and it serves as a delightful refresher course for those who know Constable and a brilliant introduction...
...without much crispness of language. His Collected Poems 1944-1979 is, as any bag of 35 years' worth of anything has every right to be, a bit of a hodge podge. There are some prematurely-greying early works of some elegance, rather reminiscent of early Philip Larkin or John Wain ("Belgian Winter," "Retrospect"); there is some doggerel ("Fair Shares for All"); there is some sophomoric drivel ("Toys," "Report"); there are fine things ("Science Fiction," "A Song of Experience"--the latter with witty, well-crafted verses like "He tried all colours, white and black, and coffee/Though quite a few were chary...
...Pardoner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is that ecclesiastic scamp who sells indulgences and moonlights pig bones and rags as holy relics. Giles Hermitage, 50, the self-revealing hero of John Wain's new novel, also traffics in illusions. He is a writer whose books, like those of Wain himself, "were civilized and responsible, neither condescending to nor affronting the reader, and commanded a small but not fickle public...
Fiction within fiction is an old form, predating Chaucer, Boccaccio and perhaps even Scheherazade, who provided the first law of storytelling: enchant or perish. Author Wain seems familiar with the rewards and risks of laminating two tales. Wain may not achieve the iridescences of Vladimir Nabokov, modern master of the technique, but he moves from one story to the other without draining color from either. One reason is Giles' ability to regard himself as a character. His comments when both he and his fictional doppelgänger love and lose: "He had been able to contemplate the story...
...notion of art as roof gutter is nicely suited to Wain's thoughtful treatment of two middle-aged men joyfully making fools of themselves over younger women. In less knowing hands, The Pardoner's Tale might have been only a clever sex reversal on the stock English romance about a maiden schoolteacher's brief tryst in Italy. But instead of sentimentality, Wain offers genuine sentiments. Instead of passion enveloping quivering loins in petals of fire, there is a steady sensuous glow that warms the brain...