All True Not a Lie in It
Written by Alix
Hawley
Published by
Alfred A. Knopf Canada
Review by
Shelley A. Leedahl
$29.95 ISBN 978-0-345-80855-4
Being of the slightly suspicious sort, I
will refrain from making predictions about chief juries’ receptions of All True Not A Lie In It, and simply
state that if the acutely-etched portrait Alix Hawley paints of American pioneer
Daniel Boone even faintly resembles
the real man, a stronger spirit has rarely roamed this earth.
Here is quintessential Boone: “I thin down
to sinew, I feel strung like a bow … I fashion myself a real bow and some
arrows with saplings and gut … I shoot a wildcat with it just as it considers
tensing to spring at me … It falls, shot clean. Killing it so, without touching
it or hurting it, is a beauty to me, there is no other like it. I love that bow
sending its quick arrow to the heart just as if it is stopping time.” The unlikely
combination of fierce wanderlust and waxing poetic squarely hits the mark.
In her foreword to this ambitious and mesmerizing
first novel, Hawley writes that she knew little of this “slippery character, a
peculiar mix of famous and forgotten” before she began scoring his tale. To
that I say this: holy research, and readers: Take Notice Now. The frighteningly
talented Kelowna writer (and Okanagan College professor) seized this reader like a rider on a fly-past
horse; it is indeed difficult to reconcile that Hawley herself has only graced
this earth since 1975.
“Your sister is a whore,” the fictional story
begins. These five words set both the book’s elegiac tone and introduce us to
one of Boone’s three families—his childhood, Quaker family; his own wife and
progeny; and the Shawnee family he is adopted into. All figure prominently. Central
to Boone’s character is the early death of his elder brother, Israel. “Dan”
drags a litany of dead with him, as if on a leash. He is similarly haunted by familial
misdeeds (his grandfather built the Quaker Meeting House in Exeter,
Pennsylvania “as a penance” for his “whoring” in England before arriving in America),
and by the wild reputation that precedes him (his “woodman’s prowess” and
“nobility of character” are propelled by Will, who tails him from childhood on
and widely publishes accounts of Boone’s life), but Boone’s greatest ghost is
his burning lust for settling paradisiacal Kentucky. Folks, there’s a lot going
on.
Hawley writes in First Person: “I watch
for anything to shoot. Anything. I watch for signs, for tracks, for moving
shadows, for twitches in the trees and grass”. From his earliest days, the
larger-than-life protagonist possesses a hyper-aware ability to “follow the
animals’ thoughts”. His own poetic and philosophical thoughts are often
revealed in short bursts, which serve to emulate the bursting dramas that
define his legendary life.
Perhaps the author’s greatest talent lies
in her cinematic ability to manipulate the focus and pacing. She handily moves
between the everyday (ie: young Boone “suck[s] in the kitchen-garden smell of
onions and graves” at his grandfather’s
stone house) and between Boone’s rich interior life, and between the landscapes
and brutal battles he experiences as he restlessly crisscrosses the early map
of America. There is no peace for this man: he was fired up early on by Israel’s
admonition to do as he likes. Our hero feels “Forting up is rotten,” and he “hate[s]
wagoning down to the pit of [his] gut,” thus he repeatedly takes off in various
configurations: alone, with his adventurous counterparts, or dragging his
family and fellow pioneers along behind him in their “clanking parade” of
carts, livestock, and “children always falling out of their baskets”.
The detailing is spectacular: “Under the
splintery red face on the sign for The Indian Queen tavern, a man pukes neatly
and then deposits a backgammon piece in the puddle.” Hawley’s not one to avert
a graphic scene. There is a scalping “How To,” and she writes of Boone and
company’s hazing-like torture—which includes running a gauntlet, being dunked
in icy river water, and having fistfuls of hair wrenched from their skulls by
Shawnee women—with such credibility one veritably experiences the pain.
Although
Boone’s cleverly portrayed in all of his man’s-manliness, Hawley equally reveals
his flipside. The portrayals of this complex man as beguiled suitor (especially
the slow-motion scene of Boone’s future wife sitting in a tree picking cherries)
and loving father (particularly when he cuddles with his “far too old for this”
son before a campfire) are well worth owning the book for.
Daniel Boone, as both history and Hawley
attest, possessed an innate aptitude for not getting killed … by the Shawnee,
Iroquois and Cherokee, by British and French
soldiers, by cold, starvation, wild animals, and by his own omnipresent grief.
“I am an empty house where sounds echo and have nothing to catch upon,” he confesses,
after being separated from his true family for far too long. They have become
“like a set of knives stuck in me and pulled out again, leaving holes.”
Here is a prediction I do feel safe in making: All True Not A Lie In It will make an
indelible mark.
Shelley A. Leedahl is
a multi-genre writer in Ladysmith, BC. Her latest book is the essay collection I Wasn’t Always Like This (Signature
Editions, Winnipeg).
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