Forester builds out Allnut’s character with, perhaps, the comfort of the readers of the 1930s in mind. This trait is remarked on by the author more than once. His significant trait is his pliability, demonstrated in his inclination to bend to Rose’s will from the start. For much of the book Rose and Allnut are the only characters, alone on the African Queen making their way through rapids and other challenges as they approach Lake Wittelsbach.Īllnut doesn't rise much above caricature - he’s a solidly built, mechanically-inclined man of few words, not given to thinking too much about things outside his immediate view. It’s mostly a character study of Rose wrapped into enough of a plot to carry it off as a novel. Forester’s 1935 love story that later was the basis for the 1951 movie starring Humphrey Bogart as Allnut and Katharine Hepburn as Rose. With Allnut, she hatches a plan to take the African Queen down the river Ulanga to the lake where the German navy boat the Königin Luise patrols, and blow her up.Īnd so begins C.S. Rose mourns of course, but also finds her passions inflamed against the Germans whose actions caused the failure of her brother’s mission, and who she now blames for his death. Captain Charlie Allnut, a fellow Brit (Cockney in fact), who pilots the African Queen, regularly stops in to bring supplies to the mission, and shows up just in time to bury the Reverend. Rose Sayer, devoted sister of the British Anglican missionary Samuel Sayer, is alone with her brother at his mission when he passes on. The African Queen is set in the German East Africa of World War I.

The african queen by cs forester