Review of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King

     I actually finished a book last week. My partner and I subscribe to about six or seven magazines, so sometimes we find it difficult to reign ourselves in from distraction from longer works, both fiction and non. For the record, she is much better at avoiding distraction from novels than I and somehow manages to read longer, more densely written novels in the time it would take me to read a no less complex but much shorter novel like Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow. Two years ago the opposite was true. It would seem that she gains cerebral acuity while I, sadly, am losing it.

     That being said, for my first novel in about seven or eight months, I was profoundly happy with Bellow's lighter and more forgiving version of Heart of Darkness. Instead of a man going to Africa to learn about the depths that the human spirit can potentially sink to, he tells the story of a man who travels to Africa to do the opposite. To be sure, Bellow mocks his protagonist to no end, and Henderson's elevated and affected speech make him sound to the reader's ear like someone who speaks English well, but not as a first language. His words are chosen so deliberately that one cannot help but pity Henderson, time and again, as he makes his sad attempts at "figuring out" what his life is all about. But I move too quickly. A brief plot summary would be prudent before any more discussion.

     Henderson is an aging man, saturated in a mid-life crisis. He finds himself lost in his own life and would have you believe that the rest of his family is as eccentric as he is, which could very well be true, but it hardly matters to the reader’s sense of who this man really is. After suffering what could be termed a mid-life crisis, he joins a newly wed couple on their honeymoon to Africa. One doesn’t have to be married or even cohabitating with another individual to know how badly this must have been for the couple, or at least the wife, and he quickly abandons them to the African interior. He joins a group of loving and accepting Africans and makes a daring but failed attempt at saving them from certain disaster. After embarrassing himself thoroughly, he flees with his companion (a man he hired to show him the parts of Africa that tourists fail to see) until he meets with another tribe of people, less accepting at the outset, and becomes steadfast friends with their king. The rest of the tale consists of his quasi-apprenticeship under the king.

     As I said before, you cannot help but pity Henderson, but you also cannot help but love him. For all of his faults, he is a sincere man that believes in his heart that what he is doing is right and is not ashamed to admit his shortcomings. The reader is at times forced by Henderson's reserved descriptions to fish meaning out of his words, or more accurately to fish truth out of his words, but it still remains that the truth is there to be discovered. Henderson may mislead, but he misleads himself whenever he misleads the reader, and he never lies. His personality reminds us of our own diluted selves when our ambition outpaces our abilities and we become disappointed that we cannot achieve the things we set out to do.

     I couldn’t finish this review without saying something of the relationship that exists between Henderson and the King of the tribe with which he spends the majority of his time. In the post-queer theory world of literary theory and criticism, it would be easy to read certain homoerotic overtones to the conversations between the two men. And it could very well be that Saul Bellow intended some of that, though I find it pretty unlikely. I think that doing so actually makes too simple the relationship that Henderson builds with the man who would be his king. Sometimes King Dahfu is a father, sometimes a teacher. Sometimes he is a fellow journeyman, and sometimes a guide. Sometimes he is an experimenter, and sometimes he is the examined. Part of the charm of the novel is that it presses the reader to look at the dual nature of humanity. Henderson’s relationship with the king exemplifies this tremendously. Henderson grows, however little, as a result of his exposure to a man like King Dahfu. It’s okay if their relationship is at times too complex to understand. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Because that’s the way that real life is.