Customer Reviews

Henderson's Spear: A Novel

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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.

In this consummately romantic double narrative, the reader discovers in the first hundred words (!) that the speaker is Olivia Wyvern, a 38-year-old woman falsely accused of murder and in prison in Arue, "on the far side of the world," that she has been contacted by the child she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen, and that she is writing a letter to this child.

Within the first ten pages, Wright efficiently involves the reader in further details of Olivia's life, as she muses over the death of her mother "over a parrot" and reminisces about the old house in which the family has lived for 200 years, a house loaded with documents, letters, and artifacts, including a strange, 14' long ebony spear, supposedly an assegai from Africa. We find out that Olivia's mother was disowned, that she never revealed information about her family background, and that Olivia's father was declared missing in Korea. In a locked box Olivia has found five notebooks written by Frank Henderson, a former owner of the house, an adventurer who traveled around the world for three years in the late 1800's with Crown Prince Eddy and Prince George.

As Olivia Wyvern, through her letter to her daughter, and Frank Henderson, through his newly discovered journals, tell their stories in alternate chapters, the reader learns how Olivia, a film maker, came to be imprisoned in Tahiti and of her search for her father and her family history. We learn about Henderson's travels with the teenage princes through Africa in the 1880's, their search for identity, their sexual curiosity, and their mysterious three-week stop in Tahiti.

Wright pulls out all the stops in this novel, using every romantic element imaginable to pique the reader's curiosity and involve his/her emotions. He also includes, however, historical background which gives this novel more depth than some other romances. In Olivia's story, the aftereffects of French colonialism in the Pacific, along with France's A-bomb tests in Polynesia, are included, and Lars Lindquist, an adventurer who sailed on the Kon Tiki with Thor Heyerdahl, is a character. Melville's novel Typee, set in Tahiti, is discussed at some length. In the Henderson story, discussions of Darwin, native opposition to French colonialism, the "secret" story of Prince Eddy, and traditional customs of the local Polynesians are included. With good description and unique imagery, this entertaining, plot-driven novel offers several hours of total escape for those seeking it. Mary Whipple

As in his first novel, A Scientific Romance, Wright puts a lot of effort into structure: here he deftly melds the memoirs of a nineteenth-century servant of the British raj with a modern-day expedition to French Pacific territory, and he throws in some anti-nuclear-testing politics, a mystery or two, and an uncertain relationship between mother and abandoned child as well. None of it is forced and I enjoyed just about every moment of it. This is serious writing and serious intent. Again (I complained about the same thing in the previous book) the ending didn't work for me; I suppose I was looking for resolution, and perhaps one can't or shouldn't always expect that. An entertaining yarn without being in any way escapist or trivial. When does Amazon.com get Wright's next novel in stock?

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

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. ** 1/2