I relish the way Forester, whose writing is economical and sometimes even spare, describes the river with its rapids, shoals, cataracts, bends, rushes, weeds, leeches.
It is also a seeing off the monster (Germany) narrative and against the odds it is a very unlikely, passionate, tender love story. Thus it is a quest story as they head for the lake with a crazy plan to strike a blow for Britain. In case you don’t know the story it gives us a frumpy missionary’s sister and a cockney mechanic forced by circumstances to escape down a treacherous central African river to outwit the ruling Germans in 1914. If you subscribe to the view, as I do, that all fiction is rooted in a handful of basic, timeless stories then The African Queen covers at least three of them. What strikes me now, over 50 years since I first enjoyed it, is what a classic it is in every sense. But the novel is a firm favourite of mine and it was a treat to take down my well thumbed copy for a revisit. I doubt that my father ever read it any more than I’ve seen the film since about 1965.
That meant that I saw it several times when I was growing up before eventually coming to the novel and discovering what a little masterpiece it is. And one of his favourites was John Huston’s 1951 The African Queen based on CS Forester’s 1935 novel. My father, not a lover of written fiction, preferred films.
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