the critically acclaimed and bestselling non-fiction works Stolen Continents and Time Among the Maya, as well as two previous books: On Fiji Islands and Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in Peru.

Wright’s most recent novel, Henderson’s Spear, is a multi-layered work that explores the themes of love, loss and family through a century of runaway change and mechanized slaughter. The Times Literary Supplement recently described the book as “an intriguing, warm-toned, well-written and spirited novel, a credit to its tradition.”


Q. Your travel and anthropological books Stolen Continents and On Fiji Islands seem to be perfect companions to reading your novels. Is a knowledge of your non-fiction required reading before picking up one of your fictions?
A. I think each book should stand alone. It’s just a coincidence that my second non-fiction book was On Fiji Islands and my second novel, Henderson’s Spear, is also set in the South Seas. Though it is true that research for On Fiji Islands led to other Pacific travels — especially to French Polynesia, which is the setting for much of Henderson’s Spear.

I would agree that Stolen Continents influenced my first novel, A Scientific Romance. Stolen Continents is about the collapse of the Americas following the “discovery” of America in 1492. Suddenly ninety per cent of the indigenous people died in the space of three generations, and an entire world that was confident and thriving all but disappeared. That past catastrophe helped me picture what our world might look like if a catastrophe overtook us. In our case, it would be of our own making — the consequences of environmental destruction, climate change, and half-understood technologies such as genetic engineering.

Q. Henderson’s Spear ends on a more upbeat note than A Scientific Romance. Are you now a more optimistic writer?
A. Yes, to a degree, I am more optimistic here, but I still deal with some of the same issues in Henderson’s Spear. A Scientific Romance was in many ways a parable, written in the Orwellian tradition I admire, where you imagine a worst-case future, or allegory, and build a fiction that embodies it. That novel is a social satire, which Henderson’s Spear is not. But both books do share a sense of civilization being a machine that is out of control.

In Henderson’s Spear I try to convey the unprecedented — and accelerating — pace of technological and social change by having my two narrators view the twentieth century from opposite ends. First, there is Frank Henderson, who lives in the heyday of Victorian optimism when the British Empire, with its steam engines and belief in “rational” progress, promised a brighter future. It was an empire that modelled itself on the classical age; indeed, it sought to emulate Rome’s accomplishments on a global scale, and surpass the age of marble with an age of cast iron. On one level, Henderson’s narrative is the story of his disillusionment with this belief system as he witnesses the negative effects of colonialism, followed by the catastrophe of World War I, which shaped the twentieth century and the world we have today.

My second narrator, Olivia, writes from the 1990s, the opposite end of the century that really began (as the historian Eric Hobsbawm argues) in 1914. By having these characters illuminate many of the same places, but a hundred years apart, I try to give a sense of the giddy pace of change, and the enormous losses — losses of innocence, of human and natural diversity, of resources, of possibility — that our world has endured. For example, Henderson sees oceans teeming with life on his voyage while Olivia’s similar route a century later reveals an ocean almost devoid of life and contaminated, in many areas, with toxins and radioactivity. This is also the irony of the character of Reverend Hugh Dalton’s remark that “nothing shall remain of us but fossils in stone and a few great works — pyramids, castles, canals, viaducts fading like smiles from the planet’s face.” Far from leaving behind the great Roman-style ruins he envisioned, we can now see that our civilization’s archaeological legacy is likely to be vast tracts of shoddy buildings, eroded landscapes, acres of landmines, toxic tar pits, tangles of metal, shards of glass, swaths of indestructible garbage.

When I was on the second draft or so, I noticed an interesting coincidence — though I couldn’t put it into the novel explicitly because it would have seemed merely a contrivance. The real Frank Henderson, who was a cousin of mine, was born on August 6, 1859. If he’d lived long enough, he would have had his 86th birthday on the day the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. So here you have a guy who goes to sea as a young man in a warship powered by steam and sail, with muzzle-loading cannon. Later in his life he experiences the first aerial bombing of civilians, when airships and biplanes raid London in the First World War, and if he’d made it into his eighties, he’d have seen the birth of the nuclear age in the Second. Never before in the history of the earth has a single human lifespan embraced such a staggering degree of change. The coincidence of Frank’s birthday persuaded me that I was on the right track — that I should write a book that explored, in a specific and intimate way, the runaway human impact on the world.

Q. You seem to enjoy employing the use of journals and letters in your fiction. Can a story ever be objective using this very engaging technique?
A. Well, there isn’t such a thing as an objective story, especially in fiction. The narrator is always there, however much the writer may pretend to be absent or omniscient. What attracts me to the epistolary form is the immediacy of reading something that purports to be an actual document produced by somebody within the place and time of the fiction. It takes you there in a very intimate way, without any filtering, like reading private documents. That is the effect I am trying to achieve.

Q. In Henderson’s Spear, you utilize well-known historical figures such as Queen Victoria’s son Prince Edward (who would have been king had he not died so young), but what really fascinates me is the portrayal of your cousin, Frank Henderson. How would he have reacted to you constructing a novel around his life?
A. Prince Eddy was a public figure whom other writers have accused of much worse things than I do. People in Victorian England even thought he was Jack the Ripper! In the case of Frank Henderson, I did feel slightly guilty about appropriating a real life for my own purposes. But actually, from the few writings of his that I have, it’s clear he had a good sense of humour and was never the sort to shy away from anything. So I think that in his generous moments (and especially if he knew what we all know now) he would approve. And, let’s face it, we’re all a bit vain, aren’t we? Most of us would like someone in the future to take an interest in our lives.

As for where I draw the line between fact and fiction, the approach I’ve taken is not to deviate from the true historical record, except of course, in specific events that only my characters take part in, like the culminating scene on the island of Raiatea where Prince Eddy may or may not have done something really terrible. Everything that happens in Henderson’s Spear could have happened. That’s not to say it did.

Q. Was Prince Edward Jack the Ripper, as hinted in the popular press of the day?
A. No, I don’t think he was, and I don’t want to get into “Ripperology.” But the fact people thought he might be tells you the sort of reputation he had. Certainly he was a very disturbed individual. Today, he would probably be recognized as having some kind of learning disorder, as well as emotional and physical problems. The interesting thing is that the entire archive of Eddy’s life is missing from the Royal Archives. He has been written out of history. Unless his archive got destroyed during the Second World War — but if that’s how his papers disappeared it was a very smart bomb.

Q. Your other protagonist, Olivia Wyvern, is a documentary filmmaker who must research her subjects very thoroughly before beginning a project. She writes: “Suddenly, overnight, I become expert in something I’ve never thought about: the French and Indian War, the Dead Kennedys (the band), life in deep sea vents, the drinking feats of Malcolm Lowry, the diving feats of a sperm whale. . . . Things I’ve scarcely heard of become my life, keep me up late, invade my dreams. They become affairs. Which is why filmmakers, like actors and artists are impossible to live with.” Does Olivia’s statement apply to writers?
A. Well, certainly when I am writing I become obsessive to the point where I can’t shut things off. I can’t get a decent night’s sleep because the material I am working on is dancing around in my head. Luckily, my wife is also a writer and has a similar pattern of behaviour so she makes allowances. I think filmmakers and writers share this trait, though filmmakers tend to be more sociable than writers. Writing is a much more solitary activity.