Ronald Wright was New Faced by Knopf Canada in 1997 with his first novel, A Scientific Romance, a dark and witty time-travelling indictment of everybody. Wright’s face was not exactly new: he was kissing 50 and already known as a topnotch writer of travel and history books – Latin America, the Fiji Islands, and Australia, among other elsewheres. But he was new to fiction. In his second novel, Wright, who grew up in England and lives in Ontario, writes like a travelling man mortified by Empire and all worked up about the environmental and cultural debris of colonialism, grappling for the story to corral his material.

Henderson’s Spear recycles research, observations, and devices Wright has stitched into his other works, although this one is inspired by a bit of juicy family history. Set mostly in and on the South Seas – with cameos by Vancouver, Africa, and England – the novel uses details from the life of Wright’s cousin, Francis Henderson. The real Henderson retired from Naval Intelligence in 1919 and endured a nasty bit of jungle confinement by a tribe of double-crossed Sofas when he was a young officer. Wright smelled the possibilities of such a character and constructed a narrative around him, one inlaid with political and natural history.

Wright’s first novel questions acts of historical retrieval and documentation; so does Henderson’s Spear. The novels use letters and journals as narrative devices and warn us to mistrust such communication: they could be – probably are – full of fancy lies. Such structural strategies can texture a novel with the overlay of time frames and voices while suggesting the slipperiness of authenticity. But used in a sloppy way, they can also signal an author’s inability to otherwise sustain the drama, voice, and drive of a more conventional format. In Henderson’s Spear, something important stifles an occasionally crackling story: proper execution.

Here’s a thimbleful of Wright’s oceanic plot: the novel is told as a really long (370-page) letter from Olivia, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, to her given-up-at-birth daughter who is now a teenager. Olivia writes from jail in Tahiti (Melville territory, literary allusion fodder) where she went to solve the mystery of her father who went MIA during the Korean War. She has never met this daughter. The letter gets so long because Olivia includes the transcribed notebooks kept by a distant cousin – Henderson – that detail a South Seas voyage he took with Queen Victoria’s young grandsons (Prince George is king potential, Prince Eddy will later be suspected of being Jack the Ripper) in the 1800s. The book alternates between Henderson and Olivia, who wants to narrate their connections and tangled genealogy to her daughter.

It is also long because Olivia wants this daughter to hear all about her affair with stock character Bob, the married English prof from UBC, how they smoke and talk about Moby Dick in bed, and how once “he halted to catch his breath and scratch his balls, which had rolled onto his thigh like a pair of onions in a string bag.”

Now why would Olivia share such a nuisance bit of business and detail? Because Ronald Wright thinks he needs the
image. The challenge of epistolary forms is to include that which makes for strong narrative – arced scenes that allow enthralling characters to do sexy things during prickly conversations – while the content stays letter-like. So details like Olivia’s ambivalent take on Bob’s balls, way outside traditional mother/daughter chat-limits, obviously serve an author panicked for visual imagery, not the story’s logic.

Wright has an awful time sustaining the apparatus of both story lines – Olivia’s letter and cousin Henderson’s notebooks. They lack dramatic tension and characterization; both are often plain boring and shouldn’t be, given the times and places; Henderson’s voice is barely Victorian, Olivia’s has inconsistent contemporary verve. Wright’s travel writing credentials allow him to depict the exotic settings, but the landscapes and seascapes rarely go beneath the slick surface of outsider travelogue to suggest symbol or reveal character.

In the last 50 pages or so, Wright scrambles to tie up so many snarled threads that what we learn seems ludicrous: how does Olivia manage to write such a very long letter? Bob buys her a laptop for jail. How does Olivia finally resolve the mystery of her genealogy? Crucial, new – never-before-revealed! – characters show up.

Wright can smell great material and has an instinctive attraction to the appalling beauty of history that many novice fiction writers lack. This novel, though, feels either much too big – too many sidetracks barely tramped – or too small. With so much history to deplore, so many characters and landscapes to visit, Wright’s compelling interests might be better served by vaster journeys.