‘David Solway opts for a bawdier approach to the lyric in The Lover’s Progress. He models his lyric sequence on William Hogarth’s famous series of paintings, The Rake’s Progress (1733-35), and transports the rakish protagonist at the centre of Hogarth’s narrative into the twenty-first century. Solway makes the rake a ‘‘cruiser’’ of bars, women, and philosophies, as well as a dabbler in poetry. Perpetually in motion, the lover travels from Canada to Greece and revisits many of Solway’s favourite haunts.’
Between 1733 and 1735 William Hogarth produced a series of paintings and engravings under the title of A Rake’s Progress which became perhaps his best known and most admired work. In this sequence he told a story of a young parvenu who, having inherited a fortune, resolves to emulate the stereotypical profligate and arranges his life according to the standard formula. When the dust settles we are left with a cautionary tale curiously neutralized, to some extent, by an extraordinary profusion of choreographic detail and an astonishing technical virtuosity, compelling delight and approval (or possibly resistance) in the aesthetic rather than the moral dimension.
Motivated by Hogarth’s example, David Solway tells the story of a representative figure, a lover, of our own anarchic era which is in some ways very similar to the dissolute and ostentatious period the painter anatomized. Solway has equipped the lover with a sketchy CV: he is an inveterate traveller -- or perhaps ‘cruiser’ is a better word -- and diarist with an introspective bent, but he is also a confirmed voluptuary prone to distraction and not without a streak of coarseness in his nature.
Illustrations detailing critical moments in the lover’s career have been contributed by renowned Montréal artist Marion Wagschal.