This muted narrative, told in engravings bathed in silence, is configured from the gestures and attitudes of the people whose story it is. The artist has stripped away the specific references for the images, the facts of the public record, even the dates themselves, and allows a deeper tale to emerge from this story of no words. When released from the reality beyond the page and cut loose from the authority of the sources, another protagonist is incarnated from the inky prints. Here is a story of a man whose life is defined by hubris. The narrative cadence enfolds an iconography and a persona given over to reading and writing. He creates realities from the written word alphabets of the imagination. Stories of great figures fictions of a different sort reflect back on this wordless tale, set down in pictures engraved and printed as indelibly as the newspapers and books that are dominant in the life of Walker#146;s Black. What does Walker tell us in this life of a man who rose and fell, whose reach and intellect were able to shape opinion, structure history, delineate a personal chronology so powerfully that, in this true telling, a hybrid fiction is invented and revealed in black ink on white paper? The protagonist, we quickly learn, is a man of manners, adept at games of strategy and stealth.

He is well schooled and subject to several forms of abuse aimed to curb his truant impulses. Cruelty: this, Walker declaims pictorially, is what moulded his man, engraving his spirit with a calm, controlled demeanour belying a vast reservoir of wisdom and strength of character, perhaps even mendacity. The grim-faced fathers and patriarchs, plutocrats and titans, these almighty men lend our hero dimensions of character and act as foils against whom he measures himself, the better to calibrate his calculated advance into the very heart of their powerful domains. Walker#146;s Black is as clever as he is learned. He sits astride a zephyr caressing the massive stones that articulate the façades of a great banking hall; or in an office, at a typewriter, and writes stories. History, biography fictions of a sort these fuel the man in his private, creative moments. The life of his mind makes sense of roiling events cascading down through the decades, playing out in a country and its renegade province unused to men like him. The public theatre, we are shown, comprises men of action and gesture.

The microphone, the academic gown, these appurtenances spell out a script measured by the judgment of his mind and the unctuous tone of his players. Events are described in books; chaos is held firm in the pages of text and black ink pasted down between the covers. Our man writes, inscribes the voices and incantations of the people he meets and sizes up. His perceptions plumb the surfaces of glib postures and staged performance. In the black-and-white rhythms of his engravings, Walker choreographs sharp contrasts of lights and darks as they play with sight and perception to make sense of intervals. In the sequence in which these graphic glyphs appears, Walker describes silence, punctuating the blank spaces and pages with posed attenuated portraits and hermetic scenes. In silent voices that speak in pictures on these pages, we hear of our man establishing a profile in business as well as in affairs of the church and in the convocations of the aristocracy. A family man; and yet Walker#146;s Black measures himself against peers in suits, in the regalia of nobility, and in the costumes of the entertainer.

He is a Canadian. Above all, Walker tells us that this person writes and reads books. It is as if in the act of reading our hero is conjured whole from the page. From the artist#146;s mind we see a man who is a product of his past, freighted with certainty and governed by rectitude and proper manners. Hubris. Walker#146;s Black is brought low by the very strengths he worked so persistently to cultivate. Aged before his time by gravitas, he shows hubris by the capacity of his knowledge and by his wisdom, by his strength and endurance, by the force of his will and by a keen instinct that he can use words to craft opinion while writing history. Rising to prominence by piling Pelion on Ossa, Walker#146;s Black becomes the master of the alphabets of images and imagination, steeped in the nomenclature of commerce whose declensions confer righteousness on him and grant him esteem in the eyes of those who study his messages.

Father, author, magnate, as our man grows so too do the shadows of his fathers and mentors. They cast a heavy mood over thought and action, causing him, in order to stride on a larger stage, to turn his back on his ancestors and his country. Our man is proud, sure that mind and action can subdue any adversary. Rigorous, Walker#146;s Black tamps down unrest, disposes of laxity as he would a box of files, with the simple turn of a palm, the touch on a shoulder, the secret whispered surreptitiously into the ear of a fellow traveller, a confidant, a friend or a treacherous infidel. Who is Walker#146;s Black? In the sharp delineation of black and white, the only space for subtle gradation lies in the interval between the pages of a book or the sheets of a newspaper. Contrast is softened in the wordless rhythms of blacks and whites. In their interplay, a complex story forms, silent, pregnant with possibilities, enigmatic. The life of Walker#146;s Black is relayed in a series of episodes, discrete yet connected by the seamless involvement of the reader seeking coherence in the detail and veracity in the pictures#146; hermeticism.

Event and episode, the sequence is discombobulated and apparently random, without a discernible pattern. The initial impulses set in motion in the early years tumble forward through decades, culminating in downfall and catharsis. Our man finds, in the blackness of the prison world, a means of redemption by teaching his fellow inmates to read. Walker#146;s Black is defined by the freedom of his mind, unshackled by the anchor of his youth, prison and expectations that force him to assume identities that are not true. In the end, Walker brings together the complements of black and white to show that reading without words is the ultimate act of liberation and a way of finding harmony in the voiceless commotion beyond the page.