Henderson's Spear: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: a ripping good yarn!
Review: A Canadian filmaker writes from a Tahitian jail to her unknown daughter she gave up at birth, of her troubled past & her family's buried history. In the search for her father, a pilot missing since the Korean War, Liv travels to Polynesia his last known whereabouts, & winds up behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge.

It is that long-forgotten child's note, received while in jail, that brings up Liv's childhood memories. HENDERSON'S SPEAR is a love letter from a woman who never thought of herself as a mother, to her now 20 year old daughter.

Ronald Wright tells of the history of the end of the Korean War & the French & American atomic bomb testing on the atolls of that vast ocean. He keenly describes the affects of the fallout, the use of pilots to photograph the explosions, & the islanders' memories of being guinea pigs; uncovering an era we would all rather forget - what hell we brought to paradise!...

This novel is like a treasure chest found on a desert island, in which you will uncover all sorts of histories; Herman Melville's meanderings before he wrote MOBY DICK; South Sea Island cultures - past & present; how Darwin's theory of evolution affected his contemporaries; how Queen Victoria's grandsons were groomed for public life; how one man's memories of a life in the service of his country affects another's two generations later & so much more!

Normally such yarns have a male protagonist & this one is refreshing & unusual as the Reader listens to what a woman has to say about the affairs of the heart & our ancestors. Ronald Wright has woven out of the threads of history, a compelling story of the ghosts people carry with them. HENDERSON'S SPEAR is a tapestry of depth & intrigue, affection & redemption.

Rating:
Summary: An absorbing reading experience
Review: In April 1990 from a jail cell on Tahiti, Olivia Wyvern writes a letter to the daughter she placed for adoption years ago. Olivia tries to explain what happened that led to her current "home". Liv's father Jon was a Royal Air Force pilot who survived Hitler, but vanished during a Korean War mission leaving behind a grieving family of three women and Lord Jim the parrot. Though neither the plane nor his body was found his family always sought news on Jon.

In 1988, while Liv lived in Vancouver and her sister in London, Lord Jim dies and a few days later, mother passes away too. The two sisters go through two centuries of family stuff when Liv finds an 1899 journal written by Frank Henderson telling his adventures with Queen Victoria's grandsons Princes Eddy and George. This leads Liv to come to Tahiti to learn about Jon's disappearance. Instead she's arrested on phony murder and spy charges. While lingering in her cell, Liv learns about her own daughter, a product of a seducer who promised her information on Jon and never delivered.

HENDERSON'S SPEAR is a complex historical tale that never loses its path while entertaining the audience. Though the narrator Liv tells the story late in the twentieth century, she relates her present predicament with the 1899 Henderson diary and the Korean War vanishing of her father without either account losing steam. The two subplots tie brilliantly back together as Ronald Wright proves he has the right stuff with a forceful twentieth century triumph that genre fans will appreciate.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Leisurely. Perhaps too much so.
Review: Ronald Wright, Henderson's Spear (Henry Holt, 2002)

Liv Wyvern has a problem (well, aside from that of having been beaten up every day after school for having a name like Liv Wyvern). She's in jail in Tahiti on suspicion of murder, having gone down to track down her father, who's been MIA since the Korean War. She's recently been tracked down by her twenty-two-year-old daughter, whom she gave up for adoption shortly after her birth, and is now attempting to write a letter to that daughter explaining the life that is Liv and, in no small part, her extended family. Coincidentally, a few years back, she also found in the basement of her ancestral home a number of notebooks penned by a man with some connection to the family (no one really knows what)--Frank Henderson, who journeyed the Pacific himself with Princes George and Eddy back in the 1880s. There has always been a good bit of scandal attached to Eddy (aside from that supposed Ripper business), and a lot of it centered on a possible side trip Eddy and George made to certain Pacific islands...

It all does sound intriguing, doesn't it? And to some extent it is. Once the book gets off the ground, the two mysteries therein take on lives of their own. However, it's the getting off the ground part that requires a bit of doing. The book's pace never gets above slow, so saying that the pace increases tremendously two hundred or so pages in should tell you all you need to know about the first two hundred pages of this.

The most intriguing piece of the puzzle is left for the very last page (and never answered, probably because Wright doesn't know the answer himself): Wright gives us a one-page afterword telling us that he is, in fact, related to Frank Henderson, and while large stretches of Henderson's journals are works of utter fabrication, some aspects therein are true. This should have been a foreword. Two hundred pages of glacially-paced writing are far better served when one is busy trying to figure out how much of the stuff about Henderson being captured by the Sofas in the 1870s and then running off to the South Pacific with two grandsons of Queen Vic is true. (More, Wright intimates, than the Tahiti expedition. But, as Dick Francis recently reminded us in Wild Horses, sometimes the maker of fiction basing his materials on real life stumbles upon the truth of it quite by accident.) Oh, one other thing that would have been helped by having that as a foreword: realizing that the Sofas are an actual existing African tribe would have stopped me fifty pages of snickering about naming a tribe of African warriors after living room furniture. But I digress.

At a guess, the book's enjoyability hinges upon both one's tolerance for leisurely-paced writing and one's ability to find a character to identify with relatively early on. Thus, this is going to find a limited market in a world where Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel outsell the Bible year after year. Still, for all that, it's not a bad little book. ** ½