Adventure-filled narrative set in American frontier
My Name Is a Knife examines moral dilemma of explorer Daniel Boone is Alix Hawley’s second novel.
Alix Hawley is back. Her sophomore novel, My Name Is a
Knife, picks up where her award-winning debut left off, dipping back into the tale of celebrated frontiersman Daniel Boone. Whereas All True Not a
Lie in It traced Boone’s early life — his childhood in a Quaker colony, his push into Kentucky and his budding romance with wife Rebecca — this sequel finds Boone in midlife, ruing what’s been lost, but still gripped by the frenetic rootlessness that defines this dark era of American colonization.
In the novel’s first section, Boone has escaped his life with the Shawnee, returning to the fort he founded to warn his fellow settlers of possible attack. He is met at the fort with hostility and suspicion and is crushed to find Rebecca gone. Hawley sets up a complex moral dilemma for Boone, who must constantly juggle his allegiance to the settlers with a private emotional loyalty to his adopted Shawnee family. Narrated in Boone’s voice, this first section drops us into an extended bloody battle scene. Hawley’s prose here is taut but generous, packing all of the conflicting emotions of the siege — terror, excitement, desire, despair—into highly evocative play-byplays.
We soon shift nimbly in time and place toward Carolina and Rebecca’s story. She’s built a tranquil life with her brothers and a large brood of children, a delicate emotional stasis that’s soon disturbed by Boone’s surprise arrival. If Boone’s narrative is all action and adventure, Rebecca’s is introspective. It’s no accident that on the heels of so much violence and death, Rebecca is surrounded by fresh new life in her role as a skilled midwife. Hawley allows Rebecca a rich, if tightly controlled, inner life — full of quiet longing, swallowed rage, moments of occasional mirth.
The remainder of the novel alternates between Rebecca and Boone as they struggle to rebuild a life together, following the currents of colonial expansion westward. The tale — set mostly in the years following American Independence — follows the bloody and brutal trajectory of early American empire, as settlers murder and displace existing Indigenous populations, buy and sell Black slaves, and wreak havoc on the land. There’s a deeply uncomfortable tension between the action-movie adventure of Boone’s travelling tales and the historical depravity unfolding in real-time.
Hawley’s masterful gifts as a storyteller render these contradictions all the more vivid and disturbing.
Trevor Corkum’s novel The Electric Boy is forthcoming with Doubleday Canada.