Wales' Work

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Robert Walshe has had a varied career as a writer, one that would often have taken him behind the scenes of various publishing industries. Wales’ Work, his first novel, has as its subject a publishing house set on its head by a series of strange events.

The narrator of Wales’ Work, Robert Racine, is a hapless editor at the publishing house of Wales and Wales who finds himself charged with writing the official biography of the supposedly deceased publisher, Wallace Marshall Wales. The world thinks that Wales is dead, but Racine knows better, having been accosted by Wales’ corpse as he kept vigil over the coffin in a funeral home. Facing blackmail by the phantom Wales, Racine begins a series of bizarre journeys across Europe and North America, guided by mysterious messages inside Russian matrioshka dolls that pop up in the most unlikely places. As the publishing house suffers a radical shake-up by the new managers, and as Racine finds himself increasingly persecuted by cabals real and imagined, he nevertheless finds the time to fulfill his commitments as biographer by filing with his friend and faithful scribe a series of envelopes, the contents of which comprise Wales’ Work. And what emerges from Racine’s often masochistic quest is as much a revelation of the biographer as of his subject.

Wales’ Work is a book that should be read more than once. It is simultaneously a complex character study, ostensible biography, and publishing exposé which refuses to take itself too seriously. And if the laudatory reviews by the book’s characters on the final pages are any indication, we should expect to hear more from Robert Walshe.