The African Queen by C. S. Forester is a wonderful love story, every bit as great as the movie. It is a perfect companion read to the movie, as it offers the rich personal histories of Rose and Charlie (Ulnutt through most of the book) as well as the political history of the time. The book begins with the death of Rose’s minister brother, leader of a mission in a small African village in the German-held colony of Central Africa. World War One has spread to Africa and the village was recently destroyed by the Germans as they swept through and took everything away, the Africans to serve as soldiers or bearers (even the women and children), and all the supplies of food, animals and tools, leaving Rose and her brother alone, both ill, and heartbroken at the destruction of their ten years’ worth of work in one fell swoop. When the brother dies it is the first time in her thirty-three years that Englishwoman Rose has been left on her own, to maker her own way and her own decisions. She decides she must make a blow against the Germans, for what they did to her brother, and for what they are trying to do against England.
Enter the unlikely assistant to her plan, Charlie Ulnutt. Ulnutt is also English but he is no church-goer; he drinks, he swears, he had a native lover at the Belgian mine upriver, and he has no real desire to strike a blow for England or any other cause. But Rose bullies him into starting the journey down the Ulanga river and the rest is movie history.
I loved the characterization of Rose: she is one of the African Queens of the book, a woman fully emerging from years of subservience to demonstrate she is a women of great will, passion, forbearance, and unshakeable resolve. She is “really alive for the first time in her life.” More importantly, she is happy, again for the first time: she is busy, she is experiencing new things with every minute as she passes down the river (“there could be monotony on a river, with its snags and mud bars, its bends and its backwaters, its eddies and its swirls”) and with every day spent with Ulnutt (“no woman with Rose’s upbringing could live for ten days with a man…without broadening her ideas and smoothing away the jagged corners and becoming something more like a human being”), and she is pursuing a dream(“Rose’s high resolve to clear the lake of England’s enemies burned as high as ever”).
The river is another African Queen of the book, with her myriad personalities, passing from sluggish brown thickness bordered by thick, buggy forest through to the clearest of green water under high, sheltering cliffs, then swelling with anger and power through the cascades with treacherous rocks and swift currents and brutal turns and bends and more and more jagged rock outcroppings, then a calming down into peace along a clear stretch under shelves of rock covered with cascading blue flowers, and on further down into somnolence, into deltas thick with grass and bulrushes and reeds and more bugs, on through to mud-bottomed brown water, stinking with rotted vegetation, hidden secrets of channels and sucking mud, and then, finally, releasing herself into the Lake where the German boat Louisa patrols.
The final of the three queens is the tough old boat, the African Queen herself, who takes Rose away from powerless subjection and into freedom, who carries Ulnutt along, bringing him to a new stature of bravery and decency, and who battles on valiantly until she meets her match in the storm raging over the lake. She is not much to look at but her thirty feet carry her crew and cargo down the Ulanga, past the falls and cascades, with hardly a complaint and only a few serious injuries along the way.
Ulnutt is the servant to the three African Queens of the book, but it is a servitude that frees him, that makes him a better man, and brings him to that wonderful moment where he can love Rose and she can love him. They join together and nothing can beat them back, not the horrendous heat, the thunderous storms, the flooding rains, or the biting, pestilential bugs. The river becomes their partner, even as she thwarts them, and the boat follows their commands. They are a couple determined to see their dream through to the end, and when their plan of destruction of the German ship falls apart, a new dream takes up the emptiness: the dream of being together, Rose and Charlie, forever.
The African Queen is a page-turner, a psychological study, a love story, and a grand adventure.
