Henderson's Spear

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Ronald Wright’s first novel, A Scientific Romance, published to great
acclaim in 1997, was a reimagining of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
that combined adventures in a strange land with a sober warning about
the environment. Henderson’s Spear is no less thrilling and
mysterious. There is time travel, of a sort. The story intertwines two
narrative threads: in 1990 a British-born Canadian confined in a
Tahitian jail on trumped-up murder charges, writes to the daughter she
gave up for adoption many years before; in 1900 a British seaman, the
narrator’s distant relative, recounts a sea voyage in the 1880s with
two of Queen Victoria’s grandsons. As the tales progress, seemingly
coincidental similarities start to converge—the two narratives are not
nearly as separate as they first appear.

The story touches on the fragile nature of family and memories. The
narrator, writing about the Polynesian islands, notes: “Two or three
generations ago, Marquesan society had shrunk to where there were not
enough hands to pass the culture on. This happens in families, too, I
thought. The road from the past is washed out, and all one can do is
rescue a few artifacts and echoes and bits of paper.” There is also
much about progress—its negative side, mostly, as when the narrator
realizes that Henderson, a young man in the 1880s world of cutlass and
cannon, could have lived to see the bombing of Hiroshima. But these
meditations are carried along on the tide of a fast-moving story. We are
not preached to.

The writing is sharp, the two time periods and their tropical settings
beautifully rendered, and the two narrative voices distinct. One of many
passages worth savoring: “Memories do not decay at a uniform atomic
rate. Happiness has the shortest half-life, a quick fade to oblivion or
nostalgia. But shame, guilt, anger, remorse: these are heavier isotopes,
remaining toxic for a lifetime, even generations.”