From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:06:31 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: eliz@ai.mit.edu (Elizabeth Willey) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REVIEW: THE SECRET SERVICE, by Wendy Walker Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 7 Jun 1994 08:09:46 GMT Organization: The Internet Lines: 91 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9406052018.AA03206@peduncle.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu THE SECRET SERVICE Wendy Walker A friend says this book contains the best description of what it's like to be a rose without actually being one. She's right. _The Secret Service_ was a runnerup for the 1994 Crawford Award for best first fantasy novel, and if this is a runnerup, the winner (which I haven't seen yet) had better be something sixty-four-gun flaming-hooped special, because this knocks the spots off all the other fantasy I've read lately. Walker has written a unique, exciting novel which partakes many antecedents without echoing them slavishly, so that as one reads, one thinks of various swashbucklers, of Jules Verne, of George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll, of Lovecraft, of Eleanor Wylie's _The Venetian Glass Nephew_. There's even a frisson of _The Porcelain Dove_ in here, though Walker, as far as I know, doesn't know Delia Sherman; I suspect they're drawing on the same sources and ending up in similar subterranean passages. (Notably, both works rely on the dramatic device of a play within the story to resolve some dangling plot threads, but Walker's play is ambiguous, perhaps true or perhaps false, unlike Sherman's literal representation of offstage action.) Walker's title is a three-way pun (at least); and the themes of the book are triadic. Transformation, transmutation, and transubstantiation ring change after change upon her characters until they are all, at the end, quite other than at the beginning. Three princesses, or a princess, a maid's bastard, and a noblewoman's love-child, phase into one another, changing relations gracefully as the plot moves them into different roles; at the end of the story, the Queen of England is someone quite other than she was at the beginning, though she hasn't changed at all. Three secret agents change too, and so do the three villains. Immutable, because she is dead and preserved only in the memories of her lovers and by her still-living crime, is the Marchioness of Tralee. Hers is the vengeful hand behind all the action of the story, yet even she shifts in our perception as her plot is changed and changed again. The book is set in a not-quite-ours Europe, in a not-quite-identifiable time when the sun never sets on the Empire (another echo---Davidson, d'Orczy, McCutcheon). Here's the conceit (I give nothing away that's not in Chapter One): a brilliant discovery enables British intelligence agents to be transformed into objects. Three agents are sent on a special mission to discover what plots are being hatched by the Cardinal Ammanati, the Duc d'Elsir, and Baron Schelling against the King and his newly-wed Queen . . .. And there the plot thickens, but it does so at a careful, deliberate pace. Walker digresses divinely. We view the world as a goblet, as a rose, as a statue, as a dreamer, as a madman; we speculate on the nature of reality, and what Form and Substance mean to one another; we wander in jungles and dangle off glaciers, sit exiled in towers and drift through Paris; and all these seemingly-fractured episodes gradually intertwine and become an unshakable lattice of inextricably linked tales. The action of the plot whirls to a frenzy and then spins slowly to a poised halt; Walker stops before answering all our questions, but she has answered them obliquely, answers about as good as we usually get in life, and we cannot feel cheated. Some readers find Polly's dreamland episode to be extraneous, but read it carefully and you'll find that in it Walker is again working changes on her major themes and exploring more deeply some of the minor ones not addressed elsewhere in the book. Or read that episode alone, and then read _Phantastes_, _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_ and "Idle Days on the Yan", and Maggie Browne's "Wanted---A King", and admire Walker's skill in making a very old story seem new. Unlike many of her precursors, however, Polly does not return unaltered from the lands she explored while dreaming, nor does the world to which she returns alter while she dreams. This is a book to read slowly, intently, without interruptions. It is a book to reread, appreciating the fine touches only visible with foresight. It is a superb work of fantasy, a solid novel, and a thoughtful meditation on reality, all at once. If you want this book, you'll probably have to special-order it from a bookstore that does business with a small-press distributor (some of the big chains do, some don't). It's worth the quest. Elizabeth Willey %A Walker, Wendy %T The Secret Service %I Sun and Moon Press %C Los Angeles %D 1993 %G ISBN 1-55713-084-1 %P 459pp %O trade paperback, $13.95 %O Sun and Moon's address: 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, %O Los Angeles, California, 90036 From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:06:38 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: eliz@ai.mit.edu (Elizabeth Willey) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REVIEW: THE SEA-RABBIT, by Wendy Walker Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 7 Jun 1994 08:10:03 GMT Organization: The Internet Lines: 103 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9406052026.AA03210@peduncle.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu THE SEA-RABBIT, OR, THE ARTIST OF LIFE Tales by Wendy Walker Contents: The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life The Rescuer Ashiepattle The Cleverness of Elsie The Contract With the Beast The True Marriage The Unseen Soldier Arnaud's Nixie The Cathedral After reading Wendy Walker's _The Secret Service_, I read _The Sea- Rabbit_; having done so, I strongly recommend that you read her book of tales first, as it provides a good introduction to Walker's writing in a less-overwhelming context than _The Secret Service_. The same motifs of transformation, concealment, and the animate inanimate (all of them different faces of the age-old tension between Sein and Schein, Being and Seeming) ripple through these nine tales as through the novel; in addition, the stories and the novel share a view of human character which may be easier to apprehend in the smaller episodes of the tales before one grapples with it in the novel. Walker has taken her material from a handful of fairy tales and legends well-known to us all; in the title story "The Sea-Rabbit" she has blended the conventions (three sons, an exacting princess, and a riddle- game) to come up with a new-but-old story that left me guessing until the ominous end. In all the stories, Walker infuses character archetypes with a fallible humanity they have lacked in most other "modern fairy tales" I have read. Indeed of all the "modern fairy tales" I've seen lately, the one that comes closest to Walker's sensibilities is Martha Soukup's "The Spinner" in _Xanadu 2_; like Soukup, Walker sees the streak of cruelty in all of us. Walker shows the human cruelty of the powerful as well as the weak, and knows that it is limited only by the scope afforded it. Thus Ashiepattle's king forces her crippled sisters to pack her rich gowns in a heavy chest, and to carry the chest; the unseen soldier toys with the twelve princesses for three nights, when one would have done; Elsie's husband torments her when a scolding would have sufficed; Jack My Hedgehog, no Utopian here, brutally uses an innocent princess to punish her rascally father; and Princess Mengarde is a bloody despot, "though in most everyday matters a fair one." This is fairy-tale justice in human terms, with harsh punishments meted out more liberally than rewards. Transcendent human kindness is also shown, but we recoil from it. Berthe, the princess who accepts Jack My Hedgehog, appears to be fulfilling some secret wish to immolate herself; an amusingly domestic Delilah's forgiveness lulls Samson to destruction. Destruction and compassion are tied together in these tales. Even the fox who aids Bernard to win Mengarde's hand and kingdom has, in a sense, destroyed Bernard with his help. Walker does not follow this pattern rigidly, of course; it's not a monotonously harped-on rule, thus we are left doubting, anxious about a tale's outcome, until its end. Notably, "Arnaud's Nixie" features a gentle, sincerely helpful chatelaine (suffering in her own fairy-tale hell) who helps Esperte reclaim Arnaud, no strings attached. The fascination of Walker's prose is in its richness and complexity. Readers are advised not to be deceived by the brevity of the stories; all must be read slowly, closely, and thoughtfully to appreciate her sensitive, ravishingly beautiful writing about the world experienced in conditions human and otherwise. Walker assumes other perspectives and explores them deeply and sincerely, then relays her observations to us in evocative and colorful, yet lucid, prose, ringing with insight seldom found in such stories since Lucius was an ass. It is customary to focus on the humanity of the other, but Walker instead stresses the alien; and this strategy serves her best when she finds the alien in the human, as in Elsie's overwrought imagination and Esperte's despair, in an Idiot and in Jack My Hedgehog's father Bekynsaw. Yet, in the end, the most difficult and rewarding transformations here are those of the characters who become more human, learning to know themselves, and these are the changes that stick in the mind, when one sets the book down, and that spur rereading. This is a very fine collection of stories. I hope to see more in print from Wendy Walker soon. Elizabeth Willey %A Walker, Wendy %B The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life %T The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life %T The Rescuer %T Ashiepattle %T The Cleverness of Elsie %T The Contract With the Beast %T The True Marriage %T The Unseen Soldier %T Arnaud's Nixie %T The Cathedral %I Sun and Moon Press %C Los Angeles %D 1988 %G ISBN 1-55713-001-9 %P 272pp %O trade paperback, $11.95 %O Sun and Moon's address: 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, %O Los Angeles, California, 90036 From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Oct 4 14:50:16 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!uunet!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!netcomsv!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: dani@telerama.lm.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Wendy Walker: The Secret Service Message-ID: <35v49d$t57@asia.lm.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: Telerama Public Access Internet, Pittsburgh, PA USA Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 18:56:55 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 62 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.written:75329 rec.arts.sf.reviews:628 The title is a double entendre: In what seems to be an alternate 19th- century Europe (the back-cover blurb says "eighteenth", which is possible, I suppose), England's Secret Service has discovered a way to transform its agents into inanimate objects, and proceeds to plant its agents on suspects, disguising them as fine glassware, china, etc. It's an odd book. The writing is charming, leisurely, and occasionally florid. The plot elements are the stuff of a bad potboiler -- scheming foreign noblemen, foundlings of unknown parentage, babies switched at birth -- but Walker ignores the melodramatic possibilities almost completely. The action takes place in short pauses between conversation, introspection, or digression. (The extreme case of the latter is chapter nine, which is signicantly longer than the other chapters: It's a hundred-and-twenty-page description of an out-of-body experience.) The surface plot is rather weak: The Secret Service winds up acting on information it had at the start, in a manner that needn't have depended upon its transformation technique. (There is a second resolution to the conspiracy, but it depends upon a story which turns out to be unprovable.) What the plot does do is allow us to focus upon the main actors and their interactions: Polly, a talented and newly-recruited girl, is transformed into a glass goblet, and planted on a German Baron who is mad about glass and porcelain. Rutherford, the man who developed the transformation technique, is turned into a rose, and planted (no pun intended) on a French Duke who is a gardening enthusiast. The head of the Secret Service, known as the Corporal, becomes a bronze statue, and is sent to the home of an Italian Cardinal who is obsessed with architecture and statuary. (Most of the characters end up looking a bit more tawdry than they did at the beginning, which I found somewhat disappointing.) In the middle are two young people -- Rosamund, the Baron's ward, who has been kept isolated in a tower, and Ganymede, the Cardinal's page. I found this book in the sf/f section of a bookstore. I suppose it could be considered fantasy, though I'd be more inclined to classify it as general fiction. I recommend the book with a "for those who like this sort of thing" caveat: The fact that the book doesn't lend itself to a description of what it's *about* should warn off some readers. I enjoyed reading "The Secret Service"; it was well worth the trade- paperback price. It's one of those books that will be enjoyed by readers who take pleasure in a good command of the language. (Not that the vocabulary is anything extraordinary, so much as that Walker makes the words she uses do precisely what she wants them to do, and have precisely the effect she wants them to have.) Readers whose first requirement is that a book tell a good story are less likely to enjoy this one. %A Walker, Wendy %T The Secret Service %I Sun & Moon %D 1992 %G ISBN 1-55713-084-1 %P 459pp %O $13.95 ----- Dani Zweig dani@telerama.lm.com "You have the reputation of being one of the nicest guys in the field. We both know you're a hyena on its hind legs. How have you fooled everyone?" "By keeping my mouth shut when I read garbage" -- Gene Wolfe