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The Secret Service
The Secret Service melds alternative history and speculative physics (morphing) in a fabulist fiction about secret agents turned to objects.
463 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1992
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639 people want to read
About the author
Wendy Walker
21 books87 followersI am the author of The Secret Service, Stories Out of Omarie, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life, Blue Fire, My Man and Other Critical Fictions, The Camperdown Elm, and most recently, Sexual Stealing. I am a co-founder of The Writhing Society, a group that practices writing with constraints. My drawings are in the Flat Files of the Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook, Brooklyn. My website is www.wendywalker.com.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 17, 2020
“…that which ever lives and ever changes is, like Proteus, beyond the power of man to harm.”
The title of Wendy Walker’s first novel, The Secret Service, might suggest a book on the intellectual and literary level of, say, James Paterson, Tom Clancy, or perhaps John le Carré. The cover itself features a quaint if elegant still life depicting a pitcher, a goblet, a cup and saucer, and a bowl of fruit, among other things. Don’t let this fool you. The title and the cover are as deceptive as the objects within Wendy Walker’s highly original novel. For while there is intrigue and devious plotting that threatens the 19th-century British Empire, this is a modern fairy tale infused with fictional science, surreal dreams, and prose that’s stunningly baroque.
The plot involves raising changelings and orchestrating deceptive incest as a means to raze the royal family and take control of the crown. While entertaining and not without twists, this plot is subordinate to the truest treasure of the novel, which is the metamorphosis of human beings into seemingly inanimate objects, those in the employ of His Majesty’s Secret Service. Hence, the novel opens up with this transposition of consciousness: “I am a mousseline goblet, upside-down, set aside to dry, the banquet done.” This reminds me of the interesting, but not as interesting, first line in Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell, about an intelligent fetus: “So here I am, upside down in a woman.”
The banquet in question sees in attendance three elements of potential destruction to the British Empire: a baron, a cardinal, and a nobleman. These constituents are in collusion when it comes to the coup. Seemingly, they’re at this banquet to determine the current state of the royal treasury, for the banquet is a measure of the royal army itself. “A monarch’s strength is measured by his potlatch. Can he afford the not despicable expenditure that such official celebrations must imply?”
The King is able to hold a lavish banquet because his Secret Service members can become the much-needed decorations, such as silverware, chandeliers, and more. But the Secret Service doesn’t exist solely as a complicated method of sentient bedizenment. On the contrary, there is more to it than meets the eye in their disguises. The protagonist Polly is the goblet and thus she is there to swoon the baron who loves such wares and their materials, later to infiltrate his abode by means of a gift. The same is true for the cardinal, admiring as he does the Corporal who “despite the gout, held beautifully the pose of a Milanese Thisbe, imploring and receiving answer, her ankles lapped by waves whose crests expose a delicate patina, on the mirrored mantel….” And also the baron, a fanatical gardener, who falls for Rutherford, “a peak rose, salmon, in the centerpiece….”
This espionage incident instigates a rescue mission spearheaded by Rutherford, and he gets to know a young woman named Rosamund who, true to fairy-tale fashion, is locked in the baron’s tower at the center of a hedge maze, and Rutherford also receives unlikely aid from Rosamund’s secret friend, the cardinal’s adopted boy Ganymede who had been found by the cook as “a naked infant fast asleep in the household’s largest wine bowl….”
Later in the novel, she awakens in a kind of layered purgatorial dream, a fantastic and digressive chapter that lasts for about 120 pages. She completes tasks that are on par with a fantasy journey, encountering a metamorphosing statue, a massive monster, and a city that could very well have been featured in Italo Calvino’s travelogue of the invisible and the impossible, the city of Or where citizens steal only things they yearn for while essentials, such as food, are free: "There was a woman who stole dreams, leaving the sleep of those from whom she stole blank and uncharacterized. And there was a man who stole sleep itself, so that he hibernated like a bear, and left his victims staring, on the verge of despair and madness, night after night into the indifferent dark."
The question remains: how can people transform into objects? “To learn to create matter, and then scale down or refine this process to the creation of the appearance of highly specific forms of matter: this was the problem, the conundrum….” Whereas a lesser work would take this concept for granted or give an ad hoc explanation in passing, Walker graces the reader with an amazing pseudoscientific treatise, complete with a diagram, involving the key ingredient of opals, which were “celestial microcosms, tiny dioramas of the universe.” The stones in question were extracted by the Corporal from the cliff face of a Tibetan mountain, and they “came off cloudy, bruised, surrounded with the blonde crust of the mountain, but he trimmed the crust, and buffed and polished them; the little fires within would begin to show, like candles underwater, but burning pink and blue, or like the eyelids of harlots on a foggy night.”
What is particularly wonderful and uncanny about The Secret Service, is the exploration of what it's like to be a conscious goblet or rose. It echoes Joseph McElroy's Plus, which is about a brain orbiting the earth in a capsule and reawakening into sentience, but Walker’s treatment, applying as it does to non-human entities, is entirely original and expertly executed.
Here’s a little bit of what it’s like to be a goblet: “The space she perceived was preternaturally round; the very shape of the room was circular, but its curvature was enhanced by the nature of her vision now, for she perceived what lay beyond her surface at every one of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the compass with equal distinctness and clarity. […] All objects, though exceptionally fine in outline and strangely luminous, as if a film of the purest water ran between herself and them, nevertheless warped in a peculiar horizontal attenuation that made them seem like the squat shapes of midday shadows, though highly colored and vivid.”
And what it’s like to be a blooming seed: “As his roots awakened to the surrounding soil, and his myriad pores opened to the mordant, wormy, mineral flavor of the earth-draught which, as he now realized, he had been longing for hungrily, he felt his thin subterranean tendrils reaching out like peculiarly sensitive fingers that can also taste, or digital tongues, and all the subtle familiar flavors of burrowing creatures, and annelida and the vagrant dilutions of zinc, magnesium, and copper, swam into his senses as though he had never been absent from the perennial welcoming earth.”
Extending from the concept of conscious objects, what if one thing or everything in your room was a spy out to undermine you if not assassinate you outright? I’m reminded of an author I’ve read only once as a kid but whose definition of terror has stayed with me, Stephen King: “…when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.” This is a recipe for perfect paranoia that Walker takes advantage of with hilarity near the novel’s end.
Overall, it took Wendy Walker a total of 15 years to write this ensorcelling and crystalline novel and perhaps that’s why no one would ever guess that it’s a first effort. And yet, having been published by Sun & Moon Press in 1992, there is so far no second novel, and a hefty part of the blame is shared by those who would rather read the works of James Patterson or Tom Clancy, books devoid of consciousness.
While affordable copies of Walker's novel are hard to come by, you can purchase an ebook directly from Walker at the bottom of her website here: http://wendywalker.com/
The title of Wendy Walker’s first novel, The Secret Service, might suggest a book on the intellectual and literary level of, say, James Paterson, Tom Clancy, or perhaps John le Carré. The cover itself features a quaint if elegant still life depicting a pitcher, a goblet, a cup and saucer, and a bowl of fruit, among other things. Don’t let this fool you. The title and the cover are as deceptive as the objects within Wendy Walker’s highly original novel. For while there is intrigue and devious plotting that threatens the 19th-century British Empire, this is a modern fairy tale infused with fictional science, surreal dreams, and prose that’s stunningly baroque.
The plot involves raising changelings and orchestrating deceptive incest as a means to raze the royal family and take control of the crown. While entertaining and not without twists, this plot is subordinate to the truest treasure of the novel, which is the metamorphosis of human beings into seemingly inanimate objects, those in the employ of His Majesty’s Secret Service. Hence, the novel opens up with this transposition of consciousness: “I am a mousseline goblet, upside-down, set aside to dry, the banquet done.” This reminds me of the interesting, but not as interesting, first line in Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell, about an intelligent fetus: “So here I am, upside down in a woman.”
The banquet in question sees in attendance three elements of potential destruction to the British Empire: a baron, a cardinal, and a nobleman. These constituents are in collusion when it comes to the coup. Seemingly, they’re at this banquet to determine the current state of the royal treasury, for the banquet is a measure of the royal army itself. “A monarch’s strength is measured by his potlatch. Can he afford the not despicable expenditure that such official celebrations must imply?”
The King is able to hold a lavish banquet because his Secret Service members can become the much-needed decorations, such as silverware, chandeliers, and more. But the Secret Service doesn’t exist solely as a complicated method of sentient bedizenment. On the contrary, there is more to it than meets the eye in their disguises. The protagonist Polly is the goblet and thus she is there to swoon the baron who loves such wares and their materials, later to infiltrate his abode by means of a gift. The same is true for the cardinal, admiring as he does the Corporal who “despite the gout, held beautifully the pose of a Milanese Thisbe, imploring and receiving answer, her ankles lapped by waves whose crests expose a delicate patina, on the mirrored mantel….” And also the baron, a fanatical gardener, who falls for Rutherford, “a peak rose, salmon, in the centerpiece….”
This espionage incident instigates a rescue mission spearheaded by Rutherford, and he gets to know a young woman named Rosamund who, true to fairy-tale fashion, is locked in the baron’s tower at the center of a hedge maze, and Rutherford also receives unlikely aid from Rosamund’s secret friend, the cardinal’s adopted boy Ganymede who had been found by the cook as “a naked infant fast asleep in the household’s largest wine bowl….”
Later in the novel, she awakens in a kind of layered purgatorial dream, a fantastic and digressive chapter that lasts for about 120 pages. She completes tasks that are on par with a fantasy journey, encountering a metamorphosing statue, a massive monster, and a city that could very well have been featured in Italo Calvino’s travelogue of the invisible and the impossible, the city of Or where citizens steal only things they yearn for while essentials, such as food, are free: "There was a woman who stole dreams, leaving the sleep of those from whom she stole blank and uncharacterized. And there was a man who stole sleep itself, so that he hibernated like a bear, and left his victims staring, on the verge of despair and madness, night after night into the indifferent dark."
The question remains: how can people transform into objects? “To learn to create matter, and then scale down or refine this process to the creation of the appearance of highly specific forms of matter: this was the problem, the conundrum….” Whereas a lesser work would take this concept for granted or give an ad hoc explanation in passing, Walker graces the reader with an amazing pseudoscientific treatise, complete with a diagram, involving the key ingredient of opals, which were “celestial microcosms, tiny dioramas of the universe.” The stones in question were extracted by the Corporal from the cliff face of a Tibetan mountain, and they “came off cloudy, bruised, surrounded with the blonde crust of the mountain, but he trimmed the crust, and buffed and polished them; the little fires within would begin to show, like candles underwater, but burning pink and blue, or like the eyelids of harlots on a foggy night.”
What is particularly wonderful and uncanny about The Secret Service, is the exploration of what it's like to be a conscious goblet or rose. It echoes Joseph McElroy's Plus, which is about a brain orbiting the earth in a capsule and reawakening into sentience, but Walker’s treatment, applying as it does to non-human entities, is entirely original and expertly executed.
Here’s a little bit of what it’s like to be a goblet: “The space she perceived was preternaturally round; the very shape of the room was circular, but its curvature was enhanced by the nature of her vision now, for she perceived what lay beyond her surface at every one of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the compass with equal distinctness and clarity. […] All objects, though exceptionally fine in outline and strangely luminous, as if a film of the purest water ran between herself and them, nevertheless warped in a peculiar horizontal attenuation that made them seem like the squat shapes of midday shadows, though highly colored and vivid.”
And what it’s like to be a blooming seed: “As his roots awakened to the surrounding soil, and his myriad pores opened to the mordant, wormy, mineral flavor of the earth-draught which, as he now realized, he had been longing for hungrily, he felt his thin subterranean tendrils reaching out like peculiarly sensitive fingers that can also taste, or digital tongues, and all the subtle familiar flavors of burrowing creatures, and annelida and the vagrant dilutions of zinc, magnesium, and copper, swam into his senses as though he had never been absent from the perennial welcoming earth.”
Extending from the concept of conscious objects, what if one thing or everything in your room was a spy out to undermine you if not assassinate you outright? I’m reminded of an author I’ve read only once as a kid but whose definition of terror has stayed with me, Stephen King: “…when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.” This is a recipe for perfect paranoia that Walker takes advantage of with hilarity near the novel’s end.
Overall, it took Wendy Walker a total of 15 years to write this ensorcelling and crystalline novel and perhaps that’s why no one would ever guess that it’s a first effort. And yet, having been published by Sun & Moon Press in 1992, there is so far no second novel, and a hefty part of the blame is shared by those who would rather read the works of James Patterson or Tom Clancy, books devoid of consciousness.
While affordable copies of Walker's novel are hard to come by, you can purchase an ebook directly from Walker at the bottom of her website here: http://wendywalker.com/
January 7, 2021
I have a nasty feeling I overuse the word "dazzling". But I can't think of a better one to describe this novel.
I had never heard of either the book or its author before friends here on GR recommended this to me (thanks, guys, you're the best). Apparently Walker practices what she calls "constrained writing": her methods are ludic, in the manner of Oulipo. She describes the specific game that sparked The Secret Service on her website.
But the game she actually played was less interesting to me than the games The Secret Service provoked me into playing while I was reading. First there was the game of imagining how supposedly inanimate objects perceive the world around them, and how they communicate with other objects. Then there was the game of using a paper fortune teller to travel through imaginary worlds. And lastly, a metonymic substitution game in which people and objects circulated and usurped each other's places in a dizzying round. It was irresistibly seductive.
All of Walker's Oulipo-style pyrotechnics are staged upon a fun, romping plot. The dastardly conspiracy to topple the British royal family paid homage to golden age European pulp in the tradition of Harry Dickson, Arsène Lupin et al. Remarkably, it did so without lapsing into parody or pastiche.
The atmosphere was fantastical but not whimsical. The experimental aspects, even at their most cerebral, were always thrilling, never dry. The characters were appealing, and the final chapter was positively poignant.
I flipping loved it.
I had never heard of either the book or its author before friends here on GR recommended this to me (thanks, guys, you're the best). Apparently Walker practices what she calls "constrained writing": her methods are ludic, in the manner of Oulipo. She describes the specific game that sparked The Secret Service on her website.
But the game she actually played was less interesting to me than the games The Secret Service provoked me into playing while I was reading. First there was the game of imagining how supposedly inanimate objects perceive the world around them, and how they communicate with other objects. Then there was the game of using a paper fortune teller to travel through imaginary worlds. And lastly, a metonymic substitution game in which people and objects circulated and usurped each other's places in a dizzying round. It was irresistibly seductive.
All of Walker's Oulipo-style pyrotechnics are staged upon a fun, romping plot. The dastardly conspiracy to topple the British royal family paid homage to golden age European pulp in the tradition of Harry Dickson, Arsène Lupin et al. Remarkably, it did so without lapsing into parody or pastiche.
The atmosphere was fantastical but not whimsical. The experimental aspects, even at their most cerebral, were always thrilling, never dry. The characters were appealing, and the final chapter was positively poignant.
I flipping loved it.
January 20, 2015
On the secret consciousness and perceptions of objects, in manifold and complexly woven variation. What does an object feel, what qualities are preserved through material composition, how different must be their experiences of the world? Questions thatare not so often asked.
Ostensibly a period espionage adventure novel, this is composed in immaculate twisty sentences and vocabulary to suit its era, its slow-building action densely woven with background, explication, and elaboration of intricate systems. As such, this takes a certain amount of patience to really get beneath the surface of. Not, probably, best suited to the prolonged reading I've given it, in lieu of most of my normal reading times lately. But everything has its place here, until suddenly nothing does, the world and predictable logic unmoored and suspended for a whirling 120-page chapter that voyages without end, allaying any doubts which might remain at that point. One episode recounts, with a symbolist's cryptic force of intent, a lakeside alchemical ritual that proves to take place on a living world-continent. And when the orderly narrative flow is at last restored, not everything can be as it was.
Written, apparently, over 15 years, this is a peculiar encyclopedic epic, with a conceptual ambition and originality of subject that can only ever be temporarily submerged in its more relatively mundane plot machinations. Give it time to cast its full sorcery.
...
Previously: following an extremely chance meeting with Wendy herself this afternoon, I now have a crisp new copy of this and have shot it to the top of the reading pile. The Secret Service in question appears to be both His Majesty's in the conventional sense, but also in the place-setting sense of a "tea service" or such. At exactly the same time. It's quite wonderful.
Ostensibly a period espionage adventure novel, this is composed in immaculate twisty sentences and vocabulary to suit its era, its slow-building action densely woven with background, explication, and elaboration of intricate systems. As such, this takes a certain amount of patience to really get beneath the surface of. Not, probably, best suited to the prolonged reading I've given it, in lieu of most of my normal reading times lately. But everything has its place here, until suddenly nothing does, the world and predictable logic unmoored and suspended for a whirling 120-page chapter that voyages without end, allaying any doubts which might remain at that point. One episode recounts, with a symbolist's cryptic force of intent, a lakeside alchemical ritual that proves to take place on a living world-continent. And when the orderly narrative flow is at last restored, not everything can be as it was.
Written, apparently, over 15 years, this is a peculiar encyclopedic epic, with a conceptual ambition and originality of subject that can only ever be temporarily submerged in its more relatively mundane plot machinations. Give it time to cast its full sorcery.
...
Previously: following an extremely chance meeting with Wendy herself this afternoon, I now have a crisp new copy of this and have shot it to the top of the reading pile. The Secret Service in question appears to be both His Majesty's in the conventional sense, but also in the place-setting sense of a "tea service" or such. At exactly the same time. It's quite wonderful.
November 21, 2018
The plot here, while compelling, is rather secondary to the conceptual study of the transmogrification of humans into objects and plant life for the purposes of espionage. How Walker explicates this is fascinating and is by far the strongest element of the novel. A fiercely close second is the long surreal digression resulting from a tragic disaster that occurs in the midst of a covert mission undertaken by agents of His Majesty's Secret Service. The novel builds slowly up to this digression but once it gets there the storyline takes off into full-on bizarre territory. Without this digression, the book reminded me in some ways of Robertson Davies' sprawling Deptford Trilogy. But in addition to the surrealist episodes, Walker incorporates aspects of even more literary genres than Davies' work, and all within the confines of a single novel. It's been some time since I've read such a wholly unique work.
January 30, 2022
A truly unique book. A summary of the story would reduce it to a genre SF story which it is not. Thanks to Tough Poets for resurrecting this masterpiece
December 9, 2013
Consider. This body of work, at first, like any other between cold covers where I can almost hear the "whoomp" of its years-ago shutting, or the creak of its arthritic grand-opening again. It has been dormant too long, uncracked in that learned institution where it lay limb over limb in hibernation until... --'CHAPTER ONE' and I wake my left arm still asleep, numb. That arm now lifted to my face, skin touches skin but odd that my finger feels rubbery, not my own. I wallow in this feeling a bit, as one inevitably does when one has the luxury of knowing a condition will not last, taunting it. Is this how others experience my touch, as other? But no, the arm is dead, a stiff form, the blood from the fingers drained through the colander of the heart, this is how it feels to be a corpse--an exquisite one, at that!
And so I sprawl out in the first few pages, sensing only so far as my eyes can see in this volume, and as in that game of the corpse, ready to change directions (and consciousnesses) at a moment's notice. First, I sense Daumal's presence lightly playing the pataphysician in his labcoat, showing me his paradams under the microscope, but recast as pure ether! Instead of leading up to any Mt. of transcendence, it goes straight down, embedding me in musty earth, of being and of bodies in their messiness, where perhaps something might grow, a rose say, might creep up the walls at night. All is appearance at play, but then this pin-prick, and blood! This lowly art of objectification slowly relates to goblets in velvet lined ivory coffins, becomes a stifling one of identification. Surely the next stop for fetishistic dandyism in fine form. Or forms.
Now a set of characters, intrigue, the hushed breathing of conspiracy, the convoluted sentences from a past of honor matching up with a certain genre exactly. It's unmistakable in the rush of travel, incognito in cognition only--another garden wherein carnations bloom. Within those manicured hedges I am lost in a certain human order, sinking into humus, posthumous, veering into disorder if it weren't for the left left right second left right right left opening upon a vista of unending dream (more than 100 pages of my central nervous heft is lost in this semi-floating state). This coma-dream of intense interiority after so much fussing about on the outskirts, so much plotty plot, is both refreshing and stressful. Sensations and scenes give way and give way without any time for expectation to do its thing. But soon I see the same forms rising up, randomness giving way to order, as if in a past life, those obsessions, the one in the tank where the axolotl entrances me with his stare which is my stare.
Then how to go on? Only bit by bit, but imperceptibly. Even in a coma the human body exchanges cell for cell. Old cells die off and new ones take their place. Within a few years, the body is unrecognizable to itself, at least on the microscopic scale where babies wail interminably. But perception starts here, in the bones, so to speak, and form congeals where thinking has not yet started to think and only a strong whiff of patchouli can be detected overcoming all my senses.
And so I sprawl out in the first few pages, sensing only so far as my eyes can see in this volume, and as in that game of the corpse, ready to change directions (and consciousnesses) at a moment's notice. First, I sense Daumal's presence lightly playing the pataphysician in his labcoat, showing me his paradams under the microscope, but recast as pure ether! Instead of leading up to any Mt. of transcendence, it goes straight down, embedding me in musty earth, of being and of bodies in their messiness, where perhaps something might grow, a rose say, might creep up the walls at night. All is appearance at play, but then this pin-prick, and blood! This lowly art of objectification slowly relates to goblets in velvet lined ivory coffins, becomes a stifling one of identification. Surely the next stop for fetishistic dandyism in fine form. Or forms.
Now a set of characters, intrigue, the hushed breathing of conspiracy, the convoluted sentences from a past of honor matching up with a certain genre exactly. It's unmistakable in the rush of travel, incognito in cognition only--another garden wherein carnations bloom. Within those manicured hedges I am lost in a certain human order, sinking into humus, posthumous, veering into disorder if it weren't for the left left right second left right right left opening upon a vista of unending dream (more than 100 pages of my central nervous heft is lost in this semi-floating state). This coma-dream of intense interiority after so much fussing about on the outskirts, so much plotty plot, is both refreshing and stressful. Sensations and scenes give way and give way without any time for expectation to do its thing. But soon I see the same forms rising up, randomness giving way to order, as if in a past life, those obsessions, the one in the tank where the axolotl entrances me with his stare which is my stare.
Then how to go on? Only bit by bit, but imperceptibly. Even in a coma the human body exchanges cell for cell. Old cells die off and new ones take their place. Within a few years, the body is unrecognizable to itself, at least on the microscopic scale where babies wail interminably. But perception starts here, in the bones, so to speak, and form congeals where thinking has not yet started to think and only a strong whiff of patchouli can be detected overcoming all my senses.
February 24, 2023
Sometimes I see this big journey into poeticism we’re all on as readers as a kind of secular Animism. Humans are predisposed—neurologically, I’m guessing—to perceive complex things as though they are alive, as though they have intention. There’s a lot of complexity around us, so this predisposition often misfires and leads to irrational beliefs etc. On the other hand, it’s a faculty that can be intentionally developed. By reading literature, by experiencing art, by noticing complexity we come to have a feeling for the ‘personality’ of objects, places, words, etc. When I’m engaged with what I’ve been reading lately I tend to feel that the world around me is more alive. I’m more ready to enter into an interpersonal relationship with it.
Imagery is probably most central to my experience of reading. Wendy Walker’s novel literally inhabits images and what a pleasure! to experience this Piranesi-like 19th Century world through the rococo of the senses, to overhear a conversation the way glass goblet would hear it reverberating inside and outside of oneself; to ponder the weather as a rose does, the moisture growing heavy on on one’s petals, relaxing at the sun.
The book has its longueurs, too, but I suppose being a goblet isn’t always a thrill-fest.
Imagery is probably most central to my experience of reading. Wendy Walker’s novel literally inhabits images and what a pleasure! to experience this Piranesi-like 19th Century world through the rococo of the senses, to overhear a conversation the way glass goblet would hear it reverberating inside and outside of oneself; to ponder the weather as a rose does, the moisture growing heavy on on one’s petals, relaxing at the sun.
The book has its longueurs, too, but I suppose being a goblet isn’t always a thrill-fest.
February 11, 2008
(....)despite the amazing number of high-quality pages thathave passed my vision this year, when I turned the last page of TheSecret Service, there was no question: at this point in time, unless I come across something even more stunning, this is without doubt my book of the year.
Imagine, if you will, a nineteenth-century tale of intrigue set in the world of Myst, where nothing is what it seems and around every corner another surprising discovery awaits. The year is never given, but the century is, close to the end of the book, and it is set in Europe in the 1800s. The head of the British Secret Service has uncovered a plot by three of the continent's most powerful figures to overthrow the King of England. The plot has been twenty years in the making, and is about to come to a head. As all this is going on, a scientist in the employ of that same Secret Service has stumbled upon a discovery that will change the face of intrigue forever; he has discovered a way for humans to change their shapes. How better to spy on the conspirators than to send them those things they most obsess over? Three Secret Service agents, one of them a new recruit, are chosen as the main agents on the mission. One is sent to the German conspirator, a collector of fine glass and porcelain, as a crystal goblet of unparalleled delicacy; a second to the French conspirator, a gardener by hobby, as a heretofore-undiscovered breed of rose; a third to the Italian conspirator, a collector of sculpture, as a Milanese Thisbe. Of course, as with any decent spy novel, things start to go wrong just as everyone is settling in.
It's impossible to describe some of the novel's strongest points without giving away pieces of the plot. Polly, the new recruit and the novel's central character (if there is, truly, a central character here), finds herself on a journey that we're never told the nature of; it could be a spiritual journey, it could be an allegorical journey, it could be some physical trip to an alternate universe. We don't know. We couldn't care less. The end result is the same, and we are stunned by it. Similarly, revealing the slightest point of the plot would bring the whole intricate construction of the first hundred fifty or so pages down. In fact, revealing the shape-changing nature of the agents already takes away from the book, but I can't just say "it's the best damn book I've ever read, go get a copy." You're going to have to hunt high and low for one, I think, unless bookfinder.com happens to have a few lying around. So now you've got an idea of what it's about, kind of. But what is truly amazing about this book is its construction, its writing. It's not only set in the nineteenth century, it sounds as if it were written during the nineteenth century, but with a modern sensibilty. I'm not sure I can describe exactly what I mean, but books written before about WW2 or thereabouts have more of a sense of leisure (for want of a better term) about them. Hawthorne is supposed to be lingered over. Description is as important as plot. You are less following the action than immersed in it. And that is much of what Walker does here, though we rarely lose sight of what is going on around us. As well, and this is even less able to be imparted without expending a thousand or so words, it becomes obvious while reading that the fifteen years that Walker spent writing this novel were actually spent _writing_ this novel, not stopping and starting over and over again. There is an overwhelming sense of order and construction. There are very, very few places in the four hundred fifty-nine pages that make up this work-- to be precise, I counted two-- where it seems as if Walker slipped into cliche or took the easy way out in writing a passage. And by the time I encountered those, I was so entranced with the book's language that I felt as if those stray sentences were put there on purpose in order to draw the reader's attention to the care that had been taken with the rest of the book.
This book is not, in any way, an easy read. It demands time and concentration. More importantly, it is also a compelling book, a haunting book, one which stays with a reader whenever it is put down, until it is picked up again.
Easily an entry on the All-Time Top Ten list, and perhaps at the top of it. END
Imagine, if you will, a nineteenth-century tale of intrigue set in the world of Myst, where nothing is what it seems and around every corner another surprising discovery awaits. The year is never given, but the century is, close to the end of the book, and it is set in Europe in the 1800s. The head of the British Secret Service has uncovered a plot by three of the continent's most powerful figures to overthrow the King of England. The plot has been twenty years in the making, and is about to come to a head. As all this is going on, a scientist in the employ of that same Secret Service has stumbled upon a discovery that will change the face of intrigue forever; he has discovered a way for humans to change their shapes. How better to spy on the conspirators than to send them those things they most obsess over? Three Secret Service agents, one of them a new recruit, are chosen as the main agents on the mission. One is sent to the German conspirator, a collector of fine glass and porcelain, as a crystal goblet of unparalleled delicacy; a second to the French conspirator, a gardener by hobby, as a heretofore-undiscovered breed of rose; a third to the Italian conspirator, a collector of sculpture, as a Milanese Thisbe. Of course, as with any decent spy novel, things start to go wrong just as everyone is settling in.
It's impossible to describe some of the novel's strongest points without giving away pieces of the plot. Polly, the new recruit and the novel's central character (if there is, truly, a central character here), finds herself on a journey that we're never told the nature of; it could be a spiritual journey, it could be an allegorical journey, it could be some physical trip to an alternate universe. We don't know. We couldn't care less. The end result is the same, and we are stunned by it. Similarly, revealing the slightest point of the plot would bring the whole intricate construction of the first hundred fifty or so pages down. In fact, revealing the shape-changing nature of the agents already takes away from the book, but I can't just say "it's the best damn book I've ever read, go get a copy." You're going to have to hunt high and low for one, I think, unless bookfinder.com happens to have a few lying around. So now you've got an idea of what it's about, kind of. But what is truly amazing about this book is its construction, its writing. It's not only set in the nineteenth century, it sounds as if it were written during the nineteenth century, but with a modern sensibilty. I'm not sure I can describe exactly what I mean, but books written before about WW2 or thereabouts have more of a sense of leisure (for want of a better term) about them. Hawthorne is supposed to be lingered over. Description is as important as plot. You are less following the action than immersed in it. And that is much of what Walker does here, though we rarely lose sight of what is going on around us. As well, and this is even less able to be imparted without expending a thousand or so words, it becomes obvious while reading that the fifteen years that Walker spent writing this novel were actually spent _writing_ this novel, not stopping and starting over and over again. There is an overwhelming sense of order and construction. There are very, very few places in the four hundred fifty-nine pages that make up this work-- to be precise, I counted two-- where it seems as if Walker slipped into cliche or took the easy way out in writing a passage. And by the time I encountered those, I was so entranced with the book's language that I felt as if those stray sentences were put there on purpose in order to draw the reader's attention to the care that had been taken with the rest of the book.
This book is not, in any way, an easy read. It demands time and concentration. More importantly, it is also a compelling book, a haunting book, one which stays with a reader whenever it is put down, until it is picked up again.
Easily an entry on the All-Time Top Ten list, and perhaps at the top of it. END
May 25, 2022
In the concluding interview with Wendy Walker, she makes recognition that the long chapter at the center of the novel seems to have undercut some of the book's reception (to her confusion). The chapter was the one for me that derailed my reading experience. Not for its length or content, but for the fact that it completely shifts us away from the concerns of the novel and makes it imminently about something else entirely without reason. That is, it feels shoe-horned into the book. Once we're on the other side of it, as a reader, I mostly lost my desire to see the story through to the end, and the baroque nature of the prose became an impediment to me reaching the novel's conclusion. This is almost certainly a problem of form, because there is absolutely no reason that the Polly chapter could not have been chopped into segments and scattered through the middle third of the novel while maintaining the rest of the story.
Look, I love a grail quest as much as any. It is often what draws me to literature of greatness, like Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow and The Last Samurai, but the grail quest should be core of the novel, not a side quest.
This isn't to say the book isn't a delight. It is a distinct and wonderful artistic product that does propel aesthetics of what a novel can do forward, however, I can't help feeling like it gets in its own way along the ride, in ways that derail that delight. I really loved this book up through the Polly chapter, but once past that, I struggled to find the same mojo with it.
Look, I love a grail quest as much as any. It is often what draws me to literature of greatness, like Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow and The Last Samurai, but the grail quest should be core of the novel, not a side quest.
This isn't to say the book isn't a delight. It is a distinct and wonderful artistic product that does propel aesthetics of what a novel can do forward, however, I can't help feeling like it gets in its own way along the ride, in ways that derail that delight. I really loved this book up through the Polly chapter, but once past that, I struggled to find the same mojo with it.
November 14, 2021
A few passages from The Secret Service:
*
Even Rutherford came to derive a curious satisfaction from the utter silence with which his essay was met; he concluded by its reception that it bore the birthmarks of an idea whose time had not yet come.
*
The whole room, and the green views out of all four windows that pierced it, revealed itself in a miraculous simultaneity. A human view would have imposed some definite limit or junction, but Polly saw everything that there was to see over a boundless horizon, in every direction, above and below. All objects, though exceptionally fine in outline and strangely luminous, as if a film of the purest water ran between herself and them, nevertheless warped in a peculiar horizontal distension that made them seem like the squat shapes of midday shadows, though highly colored and vivid. Flat as cutouts despite the careful shading at the edges of their volumes, chairs and tables and figures bit into the colored ground of wall and sky and carpet in a precise and pleasing composition. It was such a vista as one might find in a Japanese screen, where curious patches that happen also to be men or boats or animals, flash against carefully disposed areas of mountains or sea. The filmy luminosity made it seem that the men and women, the easel, the sofa, glided away in an odd sort of aerial perspective, as though distance were indicated by a rise toward the horizon as well as a diminution in size. The goblet form of vision should, by this time, have become so habitual to Polly as to be utterly familiar, but it was not so; at each new view experienced in this mode, she was filled afresh with surprise and wonder. The simultaneous vividness of her spherical perception heightened all her sensitivities; her thoughts coursed faster, her empathy acquired a keener, more painful and critical edge, her judgements grew at once quicker and more complex. Yet filtering out the meaning of all this thought was a task she had to reserve for the interior of the coffer, when she was returned to darkness, and the multifarious ubiquitous phenomena of the world ceased to confront her with their ever-shifting patterns, so satiatingly rich, and so capable of various interpretation.
*
Fortune adores audacity.
*
She knew nothing of consequences, only the trust in a hope too profound to comprehend, desperate enough to bear the risk of failure.
*
What is the nature of storytelling? Is love a form of storytelling? and vice versa?
*
*
Even Rutherford came to derive a curious satisfaction from the utter silence with which his essay was met; he concluded by its reception that it bore the birthmarks of an idea whose time had not yet come.
*
The whole room, and the green views out of all four windows that pierced it, revealed itself in a miraculous simultaneity. A human view would have imposed some definite limit or junction, but Polly saw everything that there was to see over a boundless horizon, in every direction, above and below. All objects, though exceptionally fine in outline and strangely luminous, as if a film of the purest water ran between herself and them, nevertheless warped in a peculiar horizontal distension that made them seem like the squat shapes of midday shadows, though highly colored and vivid. Flat as cutouts despite the careful shading at the edges of their volumes, chairs and tables and figures bit into the colored ground of wall and sky and carpet in a precise and pleasing composition. It was such a vista as one might find in a Japanese screen, where curious patches that happen also to be men or boats or animals, flash against carefully disposed areas of mountains or sea. The filmy luminosity made it seem that the men and women, the easel, the sofa, glided away in an odd sort of aerial perspective, as though distance were indicated by a rise toward the horizon as well as a diminution in size. The goblet form of vision should, by this time, have become so habitual to Polly as to be utterly familiar, but it was not so; at each new view experienced in this mode, she was filled afresh with surprise and wonder. The simultaneous vividness of her spherical perception heightened all her sensitivities; her thoughts coursed faster, her empathy acquired a keener, more painful and critical edge, her judgements grew at once quicker and more complex. Yet filtering out the meaning of all this thought was a task she had to reserve for the interior of the coffer, when she was returned to darkness, and the multifarious ubiquitous phenomena of the world ceased to confront her with their ever-shifting patterns, so satiatingly rich, and so capable of various interpretation.
*
Fortune adores audacity.
*
She knew nothing of consequences, only the trust in a hope too profound to comprehend, desperate enough to bear the risk of failure.
*
What is the nature of storytelling? Is love a form of storytelling? and vice versa?
*
November 8, 2009
You can read my review of this book on http://greeninteger.blogspot.com
and in the book MY YEAR 2006: Serving by Douglas Messerli
and in the book MY YEAR 2006: Serving by Douglas Messerli
June 5, 2010
This is one of the most unique books I've ever read. I'm not really sure how to describe it, (and I'm confident that I wouldn't do it justice). A philosophical and sometimes psychedelic sci-fi spy novel as if it were written a few hundred years ago?
December 31, 2021
Incredible book. Full review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20EnT...
February 26, 2022
If I had the option, I’d give this book 4.5 stars, and the only reason why I would not give it 5 stars is because I found the long chapter in the middle (which makes up more than a quarter of the novel’s length) to be taxing. And, truth be told, I’d almost be inclined to rate it 5 stars anyway. This is an outstanding book and it’s a shame the author doesn’t have a shelf full of novels available.
February 3, 2023
A strange and dense novel about secret agents in the early 19th Century who can transform into household objects. The book feels very long, with every paragraph filled with florid and sensorially rich language. As an aesthetic experience it's lovely, with every moment filled with detail and beauty; the plot feels like a secondary or even tertiary concern. That is not to say that there aren't really great moments, action scenes even. But things do happen very slowly, including an enormous dream/vision-quest in the middle of the book. I got the feeling that Walker spent hours on each sentence to polish it to a fine lustre. There's no way I would have picked this up on my own, so I'm glad it was gifted to me, because I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with this book.
March 25, 2022
Well, this is a very impressive novel that does some things I've never seen a novel do before. It's also incredibly grueling, and the characters are pretty thin. Take this for what it's worth.
June 16, 2025
My favorite Changeling story ever. And also a fable around the theme of fetishism. There's a scene in this novel in which the Baron, after learning the bizarre truth about how international spies might be taking the form of objects, begins to destroy every piece of matter that surrounds him, to the point that he skins himself. That's peak Borges, right there.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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