Subject: Wendy Walker: The Secret Service

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 18:56:55 GMT

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
[email-masked] 

   "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