Product Description

In the tradition of Melville and Stevenson, a superb storyteller — winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction — brings literary art of great range and beauty to a South Seas epic. Two tales of passion and intrigue, from the 1890s and the 1990s, reach around the world from Canada, England and West Africa to converge in the Polynesian islands.

The story opens as a letter from Olivia, a Canadian filmmaker who writes from a Tahitian jail to the daughter she gave up for adoption at sixteen. Olivia's search for her own father, an airman missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the South Seas and landed her in prison on a trumped-up murder charge. The other main strand of the novel — based on fact — is told in the secret diaries of Frank to have been Jack the Ripper. Frank is driven to write down what he knows when he begins to suspect there are people who wish him out of the way.

As she fights to get out of jail, Olivia recalls her own childhood in the English house where Henderson once lived. There, while packing up the family home after her mother's death, she finds Henderson's old papers and learns of links between herself and him that she had never known, links that explain her mother's behaviour and her father's disappearance.

Written with a deep understanding of the landscape and culture of the South Sea islands, Henderson's Spear is at once a moving study of loss — of a parent, a child, a past — and an exploration of historical forces that nearly extinguished a people and still threaten us today. Ronald Wright's deft touch and luminous prose make this rich, powerful novel utterly compelling.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #925599 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-28
• Released on: 2001-08-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Amazon.ca
As Ronald Wright points out in Henderson's Spear, "Memories do not decay at a uniform atomic rate." His novel is not concerned with the memory of happiness, which has the "shortest half-life," but with those "heavier isotopes" that last for generations: shame, guilt, anger, remorse. Olivia Wyvern, a Vancouver producer-director of TV movies held in a Tahiti prison, tells a far-flung family story, which centres around the tale of Frank Henderson, a distant relative who came to the South Seas in the 19th century as a companion to Queen Victoria's two grandsons, and whose giant African spear hangs mysteriously over Olivia's mother's fireplace in England.

Wright tells a complicated story with facility and grace. The characters are refreshingly imperfect, and his sense of place, especially during the delicious scenes in the South Seas, is palpable. The author has a fine eye, whether writing about vultures that jostle about a waterhole "like mad priests" or two friends "scattering the Latin pedigrees of plants like so much pollen as they walked." Mix in Olivia's searches for her long-lost father and a daughter given away at birth, French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, and simmering royal plots and you have a novel that's thoroughly engaging and intelligent, despite a bit of baffling generational complexity near the end. --Mark Frutkin

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.