Henderson's Spear
 Ronald Wright
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 John Macrea Book/Henry Holt & Co.
  ISBN: 0805069968


A Canadian film-maker writes from a Tahitian jail to the 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 traveled to Polynesia his last known whereabouts, & winds up behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge.

It is that long-lost 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. Liv has been in search of her father all of her life, & now, with only a faded letter found in an atlas & the secret journals of an ancestor who had been a shipmate & confidante to Queen Victoria's grandsons, Prince Eddy & Prince George (who would become king at the death of his older brother), she follows in her father's footsteps & begins to put the pieces together.

Liv & Lottie were a close pair of sisters with remarkably different physical characteristics. The older was blond & blue-eyed, while the younger had thick black hair, brown eyes & a cafe au lait complexion. They grew up fatherless in the decades after the Korean War. Mysteries abounded in their home: the huge spear that hung on the sitting room wall, which their mother insisted was an African assegai an ancestor, Frank Henderson, brought back from a safari; their father's parrot, Lord Jim, could imitate doorbell chimes & babies in distress & drove their mother to distraction; the motorbike their father rode rotting under its shroud in the shed; the faded photographs of unnamed men in uniform; the telegram from the Ministry of Defence advising their mother's husband's missing in action status; the lack of relatives & then there were their mother's slips of the tongue.

As Liv was finishing school, a new neighbor moved in for a while. He was a mysterious, handsome & spineless fellow who gladly seduced the school girl. From this affair came the birth of her daughter, & because of the era everyone, including the young Liv, insisted she give her child up for adoption. On a whim she lists her name with a match up agency for children who might look for their birth mothers. Liv finishes school & follows her actress sister, to the bright beacon of 1960s London where she studies for a career in cinematography.

In time Liv becomes an up-&-coming documentary film maker & emigrates to Canada. There she wends her way west producing documentaries, finally settling in Vancouver, where she falls in love with a married college professor & produces an award-winning program about whales.

Then her sister wires her that their mother has died & Liv flies back to the contents of their childhood home. Liv gets the spear, the journals of their ancestor, penned at the turn of the 20th century & her father's atlas. From these relics, she is sure she will find clues to her family's mysteries.

Tucked into her father's school book she finds a letter he wrote to her mother in 1953 after his plane had gone down in the Pacific Ocean & he had been rescued by an island-hopping schooner. This letter is laden with hints of secrets. Suddenly Liv's yearning to learn more about her father becomes imperative & with the help of her lover, she lands a job of interviewing the aged last crew member of the Kon Tiki, a canoe built of rushes. This 1947 expedition headed by Thor Heyerdahl sailed west from the coast of Peru across the Pacific, tracing the journeys of the ancients. Lars Lindqvist still lives in the South Sea Islands near the bayside town from which her father's last letter was posted.

While doing preparatory research for the interview, she discovers that Frank Henderson's spear is not from Africa, as her mother had insisted, it is from Polynesia & this spurs Liv on her quest.

How Liv gets to the South Sea Islands; how the islanders seem to welcome her as if they'd already known her; how Frank Henderson's journals casts a light into the dimness of her family's past & how an ailing, retired native policeman offers her the last, convincing clues in the form of a letter & a cigarette case with a telling inscription, is the stuff of grand adventure.

Ronald Wright's weaving of fact & fiction is seamless, evocative & a pleasure to read. Frank Henderson's journal of his three year tour aboard the Bacchante in the late 1800s, as it sailed around the world, complete with a tutor who had definite ideas about what his royal charges should be learning & the novelty of the Darwinian theory as they follow some of the Beagle's route, are rivetting!

As she sets out for the Pacific Islands, Liv's lover, gives her a rare edition of Herman Melville's travelogues & writes up an outline for a film about the pilgrimage of generations of American men who have followed in this author's footsteps, traipsing around the Pacific & jumping ship. It was Melville's travelogues that were considered his greatest works & the novel Moby Dick, to his contemporary reading public, became the death knell of his career.

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!

Henderson's Spear is a multi-layered, richly textured saga with a heroic cast of characters with all their flaws & fancies, venality & courage splendidly portrayed. This author's recreation of the memoirs of a Victorian gentleman explorer both in the service of the Foreign Office during a stint in Africa & his earlier years, as an intrepid young sailor who saw dastardly deeds done in the South Seas, make splendid reading.

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 intrigue, affection & redemption.

My need for closure has me hoping Ronald Wright will be inspired to write the story of Liv's daughter & how her mother's “letter” affected her. Wishful thinking, I'm sure! Henderson's Spear is a keeper!

More from Ronald Wright: A Scientific Romance. His nonficion includes: Stolen Continent & Time Among the Maya.
(03/03/02)

Rebecca