Wendy Walker (1) (1951–)

Murder most foul: A babe found horribly treated in the bottom of a well. Suspicion falls upon the recently remarried father, then his son William, then his daughter Constance; but the case remains unsolved. Five years pass, Constance confesses to her priest, who in turn alerts the authorities. Convicted and sentenced to death, her penalty is reduced to life by the Queen. After twenty years, Constance is released, moves to Australia to live near William, and becomes a nurse. She lives to be a show more hundred. Before she dies, the "Sydney Document" appears in London, telling all. But can it be believed? Alas, it burns in the Blitz before the handwriting can be examined. The mystery remains.....Blue fire is an indicator of a buried soul.

But all of this is background for a remarkable piece of experimental prose. Claiming that “every text contains its own critique,” Wendy Walker has selected a single word from each line in a book about the crime written by a friend of the murdered child's father. That book, The Great Crime of 1860 by Joseph Stapleton, one of the first “true crime” works ever published, “repelled” Walker with its biases and casual misogyny and this selection technique became a means for her to work through it.

These word strings are paired with extracts taken from writings about the crime and other contemporary texts such as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin, A Child's History of England and The Murder of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell. All the extracts either shed light on the details of the murder or demonstrate the oppressive patriarchy of the Victorian age. Interestingly, the only refreshing voice for me was that of the French historian Hippolyte Taine whose Notes on England give an outsider's view of Victorian hypocrisy.

The words from Stapleton are placed on the verso and the extracted passages on the recto. The verso passages are opaque and cryptic. Like a Greek chorus, they mediate between the reader and the recto texts, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. They seem to give voice to the darkness behind the glitter and polish of the extracts. The result is quite unsettling. show less

Wendy Walker's The Secret Service is a latter-day gothic novel made more interesting than many of its progenitors by the quality, sentence for sentence, of Walker's writing. Her elegant prose is in service of a story about an English secret service whose members can assume other forms—goblets, roses, privet hedges—in order to infiltrate enemies' strongholds, strongholds that, in the best gothic tradition, are replete with secret passages, garden mazes, and towers that imprison missing show more princesses. All of this allows Walker to meditate fruitfully on the boundaries between the human and the not-human, boundaries we like to believe are immutable. The center section, in which one of the agents is trapped between object and human, is a tour-de-force, but so powerful (and long) is it that it overbalances, to some extent, the story that surrounds it, but it is in itself such a pleasure that one doesn't mind. It is wrong that book of this quality should be out-of-print. show less

These are wonderful retellings of obscure (for me) European folk tales that transcend the genre through the author's masterful literary virtuosity. The point of view moves from first- to third-person, and the tense shifts from past to present, including extended passages in the future subjunctive. The descriptive passages have an idiosyncratic manner that imbues them with an enchantment that is perfect for these stories which seem to exist outside of historical time.

A few passages from The Secret Service:

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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.

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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 show more 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.

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Fortune adores audacity.

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She knew nothing of consequences, only the trust in a hope too profound to comprehend, desperate enough to bear the risk of failure.

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What is the nature of storytelling? Is love a form of storytelling? and vice versa?

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