The African Queen - C. S. Forester

The African Queen (C. S. Forester, 1935)

***This review contains spoilers.***

I came to this book with high expectations - maybe that was part of the problem.  The movie is so good, I figured the book had to be just as good, if not better. And for awhile, it was as good.  Our pair of opposites - Rose the missionary's sister and Charlie the lazy steamboat mechanic - head down the river in the rickety African Queen to strike a blow for England against Kaiser Wilhelm's military presence in Africa.  Along the way they brave bullets, rapids, marshes, leeches, and improbable odds while developing an improbable romance.

In many ways, this book has all the elements of the Hollywood adventure formula: action, danger, humor, and attraction. The only thing missing from the formula is the ending.  In the book, they are unsuccessful in destroying the Germans' cannon-toting steamship; instead, the British Navy use a new tech toy - speedboats with cannons - to strike the Hun.  The ending is so out of left field, it makes the whole thing feel like wartime propaganda, except it wasn't even wartime when the book was written.

The other problem: Forester doesn't respect his characters. Nay, I would hazard to say they disgust him. Charlie is constantly characterized as a hen-pecked husband, and Rose's intellect is repeatedly belittled, merely by virtue of her gender.  This might explain why their quest is fruitless in the end - Forester doesn't think they deserve the payoff.  The most they get is a grudging respect from the Germans for navigating the rapids, a respect that betrays the Germans' location to the British and ultimately leads to their defeat. I suppose this could be construed as Rose and Charlie succeeding, but when you build a torpedo out of spare parts, it needs to go off, not sink unfulfilled to the bottom of the lake.

Arbitrary rating: 2.5 out of 5 unfulfilled torpedos