Love's Fools

By Martha Duffy

WISE VIRGIN by A.N. Wilson Viking; 186 pages; $13.95

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 of morals and manners mark him, at 33, as a formidable novelist already.

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 by the dictates of his morbid sensitivity. There are no newspapers, and the radio is strictly a music box, Vivaldi preferred. Tibba thinks that the Whigs are still a political party and has never heard of the Social Democrats. Her embittered father believes that "if you said cynical things people supposed you cleverer than if you said positive, obvious things." When someone asks him what his period is, he spits back, "Somewhere between 1213 and 1215." Happy people puzzle this remote pair. Giles' sister and her schoolmaster husband, an outgoing couple who talk student slang to each other, seem coarse and comic to them. So does Louise, at least to Tibba.

A fastidious person in the throes of love is a rich source of mirth. Tibba spends a weekend with her boisterous aunt and uncle and promptly falls for a rich, spoiled youth, whose brazen mother pushes her way at once into the Islington redoubt. Giles is swept into Louise's ample embrace and hauled off to a humiliating weekend in Cambridge, the place where he failed to get tenure years before and where her thesis was summarily rejected more recently. As their lives get messier, father and daughter start to turn on each other.

If 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.

Wilson has also published two biographies, on Milton and Sir Walter Scott, and until recently was literary editor of the conservative weekly Spectator. A seventh novel about a sex scandal in Parliament has just appeared to enthusiastic reviews in London. Clearly the man can write like the wind. His admiration of Scott shows not only in his respect for a suspenseful plot but in his industry. A more direct debt is to Iris Murdoch. He dedicated his first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico, about the slow corruption of a young woman who put her faith in facts, to Murdoch, and both writers share a fascination with the victims of Eros, the fools of love.

There are some other signals for a firm future here. Wilson easily inhabits a variety of worlds and reports on them with zest: the crannies of scholarship in Wise Virgin, cabinet-level politics in Scandal, the Roman Catholic clergy in Kindly Light, the vagaries of medicine in his best previous book, The Healing Art. That is an impressive range. He once declared that "most novels that are any good are written by novelists in their middle age, who have written many books." A.N. Wilson is busy. --By Martha Duffy This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.