Henderson's Spear: A Novel - Hardcover

Wright, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805069968 ISBN 13: 9780805069969

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2002

Synopsis

A masterly epic that weaves a contemporary search for a missing father with a vivid story from the heyday of the British Empire.

Liv, a Canadian filmmaker, is writing from a Tahitian jail, piecing together her troubled past and her family's buried history for the unknown daughter she gave up at birth. The search for her own father, a pilot missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the South Seas and landed her behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge. In the stillness of her cell, Liv ponders the secret journal of her ancestor Frank Henderson, who came to these same waters a century before on an extraordinary three-year voyage with Queen Victoria's grandsons-Prince George (later George V) and Prince Eddy, who would die young and disgraced, linked by the gutter press to the Ripper killings and many other scandals.

Through unforgettable characters and a mesmerizing story, Henderson's Spear traces two tales of obsession, intrigue, and loss-from the 1890s and the 1990s. These stories reach around the world from Africa, England, and North America to converge with compelling effect in the Polynesian islands.

With a deep understanding of the landscape and culture of the South Sea Islands, Henderson's Spear explores the patterns of history and the accidents of love.

About this title

About the Author

Ronald Wright's critically acclaimed first novel, A Scientific Romance, was a New York Times Notable Book. His nonfiction includes Stolen Continents, an award-winning history of the Americas, and Time Among the Maya. He lives in Port Hope, Ontario.

Reviews

Richly imagined and crisply written, this second novel by Wright (A Scientific Romance) sails from England to Polynesia and back again, spanning a full century in its peregrinations. At its core is the memoir of one Frank Henderson, a young officer who accompanies Crown Prince Edward and his brother, George, on their round-the-world voyage in 1879. The trip comes to a climax in the Tahitian Islands, where Edward becomes involved in a homosexual relationship with an islander, who he brutally murders. Counterpointing this intriguing plot is a long and highly improbable epistle penned in 1990 by Olivia Wyvern, daughter of a British flyer declared MIA during the Korean conflict. Following her mother's death, Olivia discovers evidence that her father did not die, but rather wound up on Taiohae, the same island where Henderson's adventures brought him and where Herman Melville's earliest novel, Typee, is set. Obsessed with locating her father, Olivia travels to the South Seas, where in a series of misadventures of her own, she is imprisoned on trumped-up murder charges. While in prison, she receives an anonymous letter from a daughter she gave up for adoption when she was only 16, a child sired by a mysterious stranger claiming to have evidence of her father's whereabouts, and she begins writing to the daughter, relating all this from her cell. Binding these disparate stories together is a spear, ostensibly brought by Henderson from Africa, but actually a souvenir of his Polynesian adventures. Romantic but unsentimental, this is a beautifully constructed story with fascinating characters and authentic details that play off one another in surprising and often shocking ways. The thematic homage to Melville is punctuated with other literary allusions that enrich and deepen an already thoroughly engrossing tale of the South Pacific.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

This is clearly a family affair. Imprisoned in Tahiti, where she has gone to look for the father missing since the Korean War, Liv contemplates an ancestor who sailed the South Seas with Queen Victoria's grandsons. And she's writing a letter to the child she gave up at birth.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Canadian filmmaker Liv Wyvern travels to the South Seas in search of the father she hasn't seen in more than three decades. His fighter jet went down during the Korean War, but she has reason to believe he might have survived and taken refuge in the Marquesas. Liv is jailed in Tahiti on trumped-up murder charges and spends her time writing letters to the daughter she gave up for adoption; a daughter she's never seen. Liv also passes time reading the diary of a Victorian ancestor, Frank Henderson, whose Royal Navy voyages brought him to the South Seas. Henderson's diary, she believes, may offer some clue about her father's whereabouts. This multifaceted, compelling tale is much more complex than that, but its subtleties defy easy synopsis. Wright's characters are intelligent and every bit as complex as the plot, and his prose is both strong and lyrical, full of vivid, frequently beautiful imagery. The novel generates a mesmerizing sense of place, and it reflects the author's wonderfully peripatetic scholarship, which ranges from history to Victorian-era natural science to French nuclear testing in the Pacific. An outstanding novel by any measure. Thomas Gaughan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

So this won't be that kind of letter. What I can give you, for now, is my story. And in return I hope someday you'll give me yours. I'll try to stick to the point, though it doesn't come easily-my mind's a sackful of cats and they're all clawing their way out at once. Be patient while I let them go in an order that makes sense, at least to me. Mine isn't the usual tale of a girlish mistake with a pimply boy in the bicycle shed. This stretches across a hundred years and half the world. I'll start with me, but you must hear from Frank Henderson too. I'm enclosing copies of his papers. More than a century ago, when he was about your age, he sailed to the South Seas aboard a warship. It's ultimately because of him that I'm here now.

We seem a family of writers-diarists, memoirists-the kind with secrets to dribble onto paper and hoard away. For whom, I wonder. For posterity? Or as a form of exorcism? Of course you may decide, after reading what I have to say, that you want nothing to do with me. How far can we go with genes; do they call to one another like the deeps? Damn the genes, let me choose my friends, and to hell with blood relations. I can hear myself saying something like that in your position. That's your right, and if it's your choice I'll respect it. But if ever you change your mind, know that I'll never hide from you again.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805069968
• ISBN 13: 9780805069969
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368