Secret Histories

A good mystery operates on several levels at once: It has to have an intriguing plot, the characters must be varied and believable and the puzzle or “crime” has to be tied up with no loose ends and no small finesse by the final chapter. Ronald Wright, in his second novel, has delivered on all these points with a double-plotted double-decker of a tale that teases the reader’s guesswork right up to the final revelation.

The mystery begins with the title itself. “Henderson’s Spear” is an heirloom that has dominated the house of the narrator since his earliest childhood. Its origin and importance are part of the novel’s several structures as a family chronicle disguised as a travel memoir, as letters from prison, as a mea culpa, a confession.

“Who are you now? And how and what and where? I’m brimming with questions. I’m ready for the best, the worst, the in-between. Like most of us you’re probably in between.” So begins a letter from the narrator, Olivia Wyvern, a Canadian woman of 38, accused of murder in Tahiti and writing from her prison cell to the daughter she gave away at birth. Olivia, or Liv, as she is called, asks the questions that drive the plot’s considerably complex mysteries. There is a second narrator involved, a bit of a mystery himself, Frank Henderson--the man of the spear, one of Liv’s ancestors--whose Victorian memoir forms a counterpoint to the main story. He tells of narrow escapes in colonial Africa; he tells of a long voyage to the South Seas in the company of Queen Victoria’s grandsons, Prince George (later George V) and Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), the heir to the throne who later died unexpectedly at 28. The two princes are teenagers at the time of Henderson’s secret memoir.

Liv is in Tahiti searching for her long-lost father, an RAF pilot who was shot down over Korea and simply disappeared, no body ever having been found. Her mother spends the rest of her life waiting for him to return--quite unreasonably, to Liv’s mind, until after her mother’s death, when she finds a post-war letter from her father on the island of Taiohae among her mother’s effects. Liv is a documentary filmmaker, so she dummies up a project on Herman Melville in Tahiti (based on his book “Typee”) to justify heading for the South Seas in search of her dad or some evidence of his survival.

Melville’s brush with cannibalism, the perils of “going native,” the clash of cultures, the uncertainty of life itself and the exploitation of the planet are pivotal elements in the tale that unfolds in these tightly written pages. Liv’s family (her mother and her sister) are sketched in broad strokes, but vividly so; Liv’s lovers, companions and mentors are rather more sympathetically and fully conveyed so that we come to know them as living, breathing folk with hidden agendas of their own.

The spear is a powerful totem and appears in the story at strategic intervals. It is “a great spear more than twice the length of a man” and, when first observed, has been hanging over the family mantelpiece for years. “The spear was never taken down, not even when painters came to exorcise the ghosts imprinted by smoke and time on the plaster round the fireplace. [T]he blade, shaft, and a small pommel at the base were made from a single piece of wood. The spear seemed to belong to a place or time where metals were unknown. Yet there was nothing primitive about the thing; it was as finely worked and polished as a piece of furniture, the mere look of it conveying poise, authority.”

When Liv and her sister divide up and sell off the household stuff left behind by their mother, Liv takes the spear. She also discovers Frank’s secret journals locked in a metal box in the basement. She takes these with her to Canada. And when she embarks for Tahiti in search of her father, she takes a copy of the journals with her. She becomes acquainted with a pair of Greenpeace activists planning a clandestine voyage to the very island where her father had once visited, and where perhaps he died or yet may live.

Things go suddenly awry on the short voyage to the Marquesas. The body of a recently deceased young woman is found floating in the sea, miles from land, no sign of wreckage or a ship in distress nearby. “The body had materialized from nothing, a sleeping beauty on the ocean fields,” Liv comments. One of the activists, Natalie, is a general practitioner and performs a post-mortem. They take fingerprints from the corpse and, with a brief ceremony, bury the body at sea. Upon their arrival in the Marquesas, when they report the incident, they are all arrested on murder charges. Thus, Liv ends up in prison. And she has the time on her hands to begin to sort things out.

Did this woman drop out of the sky into the Pacific Ocean? Does a faded photograph tell more than its possessor knows? What strange ideas came swarming into the head of Prince Eddy on Tasmania? Who is the mysterious man referred to in Liv’s father’s letter (“I have to find him if I can. Please understand this. I mean him no harm.”)? And why was Frank Henderson asked unsavory questions by a roomful of ostensible government agents? These mysteries are at the heart of the novel, and Wright does a masterful job of keeping his reader curious and puzzled up to the very end.

The book interleaves the two stories, Frank’s Victorian journal and Liv’s prison letters, in the manner of a cliffhanger. But we leave each episode ready to get back to the “other” story, knowing that it is all intertwined somehow, every development leading us to a new revelation. Liv is a scrupulous and trusty guide; and her narrative is spiced with a healthy sense of humor that lightens the darker aspects of her situation. Her lover Bob writes to her from Vancouver: “You should see the students I have this term. Not a kindred soul among them. When I mention Rimbaud they think I mean Sylvester Stallone.”

“Henderson’s Spear” serves history and fiction with equal aplomb, and they are blended as finely as one could wish. This is a thought-provoking and well-wrought novel whose characters and situations lodge in the mind and promise further satisfactions at a second reading.