THE SEA-RABBIT, OR, THE ARTIST OF LIFE
Tales by Wendy Walker

Reviewed by Elizabeth Willey

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
%T The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life
%C Los Angeles
%D 1988
%G ISBN 1-55713-001-9
%I Sun and Moon Press
%O Short story collection
%O trade paperback, $11.95
%O Sun and Moon's address: 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 90036
%P 272 pp.