Many people will know this book from the film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn which won Bogart his only best actor Oscar and was nominated for three others: best picture, best director and best actress. Many people will know the author for his Hornblower books. The African Queen was written in 1935 just before these novels but he was already a seasoned writer by then.
The book is set in German Central Africa during World War I. After the Germans have raided their mission station, the Reverend Samuel Sayer dies of illness leaving his sister Rose alone. Charlie Allnutt, a cockney engineer who has been sailing down the river with supplies for the local Belgian mine, arrives and Rose and Charlie decide to travel down river in Charlie's boat, the African Queen. The pair are frequently in conflict. Rose is teetotal, Charlie enjoys gin. Rose wants to go out onto the lake at the end of the river and sink the German steamer that is there, to strike a blow for the British was effort. Charlie thinks this will be too difficult.
So the pair must overcome their conflicts and also overcome the formidable obstacles ahead, including passing a German fortress, being shot at, running rapids, mending a broken propellor and negotiating a swamp and a mangrove forest before they can finally try to convert the ship into a torpedo for a suicide attack on the German steamer.
It's well written and the interplay between the two characters keeps it humming along, although I was much influenced by my memories of the film (in the book Charlie is a cockney, but I can't help but hear it said in Bogart's accent).
Being a British book of its time, there is plenty of class awareness. Charlie is a cockney and, despite his considerable skills both at sailing the boat and as an engineer, he is implacably of a lower class than the sister of a Reverend ... although Rose is actually not much above him, since her father kept a shop. At the start he calls her Miss.
As you would expect for a book of this time, there is some casual racism in the book. The Africans are treated as ignorant savages. However, the German officers are not demonised in the way that they might have been had the book been written earlier, or later. The book recognises the patriarchal sexism of the society in which it is set ("She had lived in subjection all her life"; Ch 6; "men were, in their inscrutable oddity, and in the unquestioned deference accorded them, just like miniatures of the exacting and all-powerful God whom the women worshipped."; Ch 8)), but works against that, mostly by having Rose as the dominant partner in the relationship but also by allowing sex to rear its ugly head.
There are some fantastic descriptions:
- "She lurched and wallowed and shook herself loose like some fat pig climbing out of a muddy pool." (Ch 5)
- "A beam of sunlight reached down over the edge of the gorge and turned its spray into a dancing rainbow." (Ch 7)
Selected quotes:
- "She had read the newspapers occasionally at that time - it was excusable for a girl of twenty to do that in a national crisis." (Ch 2) The national crisis referred to is the Boer war.
- "Rose came from a stratum of society and of history in which woman adhered to her menfolk's opinions." (Ch 2)
- "As Rose sat sweating in the sternsheets of the African Queen she felt within her a boiling flood of patriotism. Her hands clasped and unclasped; there was a flush of pink showing through the sallow sunburn of her cheeks." (Ch 2) The pink refers to the colour in which the British Empire was shown on contemporary maps.
- "Allnutt was not sufficiently self-analytical to appreciate that most of the troubles in his life results from attempts to avoid trouble." (Ch 3)
- "At the same time she seethed with revolt and resentment even against the god-like male." (Ch 4)
- "They were of the generation and class which had been educated to think that all good food came out of tins." (Ch 9)
Book club questions
- What do you make of the character of Allnutt? How does he show his practical skills? What makes him become a hero?
- What breaks down the barriers between Rose and Allnutt?
- How are the Germans portrayed throughout the story?
- How is Forester’s love of boats and maritime skills shown?
- What makes for an adventure story? How is this different from serious fiction or classic literature? Which features of adventure writing are seen in The African Queen?
- What did you think of the ending - from the time Rose and Allnutt enter the big lake and spot the Luise?
- Forester’s critics say that he is good at adventure writing but weak on romance. How is this weakness shown in this novel?
- How does the novel reflect the ideas of its time, written in the mid 1930s and set in the First World War? You might like to consider gender, race, empire and class. Is it right for us to judge fiction written in a different era using our modern sensitivities?
- Having recently read another novel set on a boat journeying up an African river over a hundred years ago, how does Heart of Darkness compare with the African Queen? Are there any similarities?
I have recently read Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella about a boat travelling along an African river.
I have also read two books set in German East Africa during the First World War:
- An Ice Cream War by William Boyd
- Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
June 2023; 190 pages
No comments:
Post a Comment