“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 of Science Fiction
“That a late 20th-century literary masterpiece should slip by unheralded, hardly available, is commonplace. The status of Wendy Walker's The Secret Service is recognised by its American publishers, Sun & Moon, who have issued it in their 'Classics' series…The book begins with a ceremonial banquet for the marriage of the young king and queen, to which the three villains have been expressly invited in order to be seduced by the beautiful objects before them, little realising they are all in fact human spies. The result is like a fin de siecle Ruritanian adventure re-written by Gertrude Stein and Ronald Firbank…The Secret Service is the first masterpiece of the age of morphing.”
—Adrian Dannatt, The Independent
The Secret Service
Sun & Moon, 1992. (Reissued by Tough Poets in 2021)
Paperback, Trade | $19.98
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Reviews:
Video Review from Sean Spillane’s ‘Travel Through Stories’
Adrian Dannatt in The Independent
“No one reads Wendy Walker’s The Secret Service…”
“Imagine a painting…” by Ian Davey
“Mannerist Narrative” by Ray Davis
“This is a curiously fanciful spy novel, apparently set in the 18th century, the time period in which the museum as an institution originated. The central device is that members of a secret service are able to transmute themselves into physical objects – elegant pieces of porcelain, fine glass, and sculpture. These pieces are given as gifts to foreign dignitaries and are able to observe and communicate back. The writing is exquisite, especially how it gives one the sense of actually being an object.”
—David Wilson, Founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology
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.