THE SECRET SERVICE
Wendy Walker

Review by Elizabeth Willey
 
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
 
%T _The Secret Service_
%A Wendy Walker
%C Los Angeles
%D 1993
%I Sun and Moon Press
%G ISBN: 1-55713-084-1
%O Sun and Moon's address: 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 90036
%O trade paperback, $13.95
%P 459 pp.