Word: wises
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...meaningless leftover notes in a rented memory typewriter; going to a Chinese hypnotist for writer's block; discovering why "deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power." By the flares of such insights, one finds the way through Pitch Dark, a wise and beautifully shaped book...
...Wise Virgin is about a few months in the life of Giles Fox, a medievalist who lost his eyesight after 18 years of labor on a scholarly edition of A Treatise of Heavenly Love, a 13th century meditation on virginity. Two virgins attend him: his pretty, unworldly teen-age daughter Tibba, named for a 6th century East Saxon princess, and Louise, his frumpy, incompetent, adoring assistant. (The manuscript is imaginary, and Wilson, who has taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, has fun cooking up swatches of 13th century English.) Giles and Tibba live in a bare house in Islington ruled...
...WISE VIRGIN by A.N. Wilson Viking; 186 pages...
Fortune ought to smile on the career of A.N. Wilson. He is one of a fairly rare literary species: a writer of social comedies. He is also prolific-Wise Virgin, his first book to be published in this country, is his sixth novel-and very good. Not for him the extravagant mythmaking of his contemporary Salman Rushdie or the chilly experiments of Ian McEwan. Stylistically, Wilson is headed straight into the past, when a novelist told a suspenseful story and commanded his characters' souls. He can be flippant and overly mordant, but his lively wit and fine sense...
...Wilson only toyed with Giles and Tibba, this would be a flashy piece of fictional ice skating. But while the author humbles his proud pair, he also proves to be a tender provider in the end. Wise Virgin (there are none here outside the old manuscript) is both deeper and more compassionate than Wilson's earlier novels, as if he had put aside the temptation to echo Evelyn Waugh's inimitable malice and had found his own balance between light and dark comedy...