Review: 'Spear' a terrific South Sea tale

"Henderson's Spear"
By Ronald Wright
Henry Holt
Fiction
334 pages

(CNN) -- Mystery, adventure, romance, dangerous secrets and exotic locales -- all the ingredients for the literary equivalent of fast food, quickly digested and just as quickly forgotten. It is to the everlasting credit of Ronald Wright that he has concocted from the same raw material a richly imagined story that lingers on the mind's taste buds like a gourmet feast.

"Henderson's Spear" is masterfully constructed and beautifully written. The deliciously complex plot stretches across a vast and multi-textured landscape populated by fascinating characters, fictional and historical.

At the heart of the sprawling storyline -- spanning a century and stretching from England to Africa to the South Seas -- is a very intimate tale. Well, two of them.

The first is told by Olivia Wyvern, a British-born Canadian documentary filmmaker. The second is told by Frank Henderson, a Royal Navy officer whose career began in the Victorian era and ended in the aftermath of the First World War. Wright intertwines their narratives, as their lives became intertwined, in a triumph of storytelling. Each character speaks in a unique voice, yet echoes of each can be heard in the other.

A letter and a journal, years apart

No summary can do justice to the intricately woven plot. Olivia tells her story in a long letter she's writing to the daughter she gave up for adoption more than 20 years earlier. She's imprisoned in Tahiti, accused of murder, a crime she didn't commit. She's telling her daughter the story of her life.

In doing so, she includes entries from Henderson's journal, written a hundred years earlier as he convalesced from injuries and ailments he suffered while serving in Africa. In the process, he divulges the details of a much earlier adventure that brought him into contact with two princes -- George and Eddy, the grandsons of Queen Victoria.

Olivia went to the South Seas in search of her father, an RAF pilot reported missing in action during the Korean War. She finds herself retracing the steps not only of her father, but also of Henderson and of Herman Melville.

Wright, author of acclaimed travel books, provides a lush backdrop for the story. But it is tinged with regret for the islands, despoiled by the wars, exploitations and neglect of their European "discoverers." His perceptive descriptions aren't limited to the physical locations. He has an equally sharp eye for the landscapes of the soul.

'The gale of chance'

Olivia's long airplane trip from Canada to Tahiti offers Wright an opportunity to explore her inner terrain.

"In those shiny cocoons of rancid air and rushing noise," he writes, "where life hangs on a single flaw or stroke of malice, I often think over the inches burned from my candle of unknown length. On the ground, dazzled by the steady flame consuming time, we live as if our light will burn forever. But eight miles high above the world, where humans have no right to be, the flame sinks and I see it as it is, faltering in the gale of chance."

As Olivia unravels the mystery of her father's disappearance, she is drawn into a deeper and -- if possible -- more personal mystery about herself. The resolution ties up the loose ends not only of her life, but of her father's and Henderson's, at the same time tying all three lives together.

"Henderson's Spear" is as quietly powerful as a tropical sunset. Wright not only balances the demands of two first-person narratives but uses them to reinforce and enrich each other. The result is a story that enchants -- and haunts -- the reader, in the same way the South Sea islands have enchanted and haunted generations of visitors.