Search Worlds Without End

The Secret Service came into being one night in 1976 while I was playing a game. I would take a list of words encountered in my reading, and which I had looked up in the OED, and write a story using them. On this particular occasion, the story seemed to promise to go on, though for how long I certainly had no inkling. My experience of writing it was certainly a long act of following out the premises laid down in the opening, and it led me into such fascinating areas as the history of porcelain, the botany of roses, and scenic design in the nineteenth century theater.

I have since learned that this game is practiced, under the name logorallye, by the OuLiPo, as a kind of warm-up exercise at its summer workshops.

The publisher wrote:

The Secret Service is a novel of rare range and power. Its overarching plot framework provides a great architecture for Walker's beautifully made language. Many genres and styles--naturalism, allegory, surreal catalogs, philosophical and metaphysical fables, dreams--are woven into an epic story of intrigue and political maneuvering.

In a Europe that resembles...that of the nineteenth century, the English Secret Service has gotten wind of a plot against the young, newly married king and queen. The details of this plot must be uncovered. The suspected architects of it--an Italian baron, a French cardinal, a German nobleman--are men of finely honed connoisseurships. Each is obsessed with a particular pursuit--one with roses and their infinite variety; another with fine glass and porcelain; another with classical sculpture. The Secret Service has discovered a method of physical transformation that enables their agents to masquerade as objects; in this case, as the precious objects of the foreigners' obsessions. (Walker's explication of the fabular physics of this transformation is one of the wonders of the book.)

The events that this transformation set in motion blossom into the most amazing ramifications, creating a fiction second to none for richness of invention, vision, and chimerical psychology. Here is a novel that does not recapitulate banality; Walker honors possibility, and the great range that language, dream, emotion, and intellect together can produce. The Secret Service is a new voice's finest creation.

The novel is filled with strange erudition, sensuous descriptive language, broken glass, crackpot science, gruesome technology, unexpected turns, and a succession of stories within stories...
--Henry Wessells, The New York Review

Four spellbinding tales, selected from Wendy Walker's critically-acclaimed short fiction collections Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist of Life (1988) and Stories Out of Omarie (1995), showcase some of her finest work as she takes on the themes of art, memory and tragic love in pre-modern Europe and North Africa. "Twin Knots" presents the Goddess of Love's take on an affair between a knight and an unhappy queen. In another tale, a count punishes his daughter for the attempted murder of her husband by placing her in a barrel and sending her out to sea, where adventures with pirates and a powerful sultan ensue. Publishers Weekly writes, "Walker's sentences grow and ramify as luxuriantly as vines in an enchanted wood."

Table of Contents:

• The Cathedral - (1988) - short fiction
• Ashiepattle - (1988) - short story
• The Twin Knots - (2006) - short story
• A Story Out of Omarie - (2006) - short story