All True Not a Lie in It

Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.
— Daniel Boone

In the preface to All True Not a Lie in It, author Alix Hawley says of her subject Daniel Boone, “My story is about trying to find him. His story is about trying to find paradise, and about what happened when he brought about its ruin.” I must confess that I didn't know a thing about the famous frontiersman, and although Hawley starts with Boone's Pennsylvania childhood and traces his peripatetic biography for the next five decades, I was left feeling like I still hadn't gotten to know him (and had to turn to wikipedia to fill in the blanks). As a Canadian, I started with no particular hero worship of the subject, and based on both this book and the wikipedia info, I'm left scratching my head and wondering, “So why was Daniel Boone a legend in his own time after all?” 

There is something halting and hesitant about this book, as though none of the characters is willing to be straightforward, and although we spend the entire time inside Boone's brain, I didn't grow to understand his motivations at all. I didn't understand why the rich and prominent William Hill would keep showing up in Boone's life, offering to give him money and opportunities; declaring from the time they were antagonistic children together that he'd be the one to write a biography of Boone one day (despite Boone being the unremarkable and unsociable child of outcast members of their Quaker community). I didn't understand the leap from Boone being sweet on Rebecca, to bagging her a deer, to suddenly marrying her. I didn't understand why every time his growing family was settling in somewhere, Boone would schlep them all off to clear a homestead in some new wilderness (but I did enjoy the image of the babies being packed in baskets on the flanks of horses, wailing and crying for their Mama). 

The language in All True is lovely and poetic, but I found it to be somewhat incompatible with the subject, and the more I thought about it, I wonder if it's because it read as feminine prose (would a man kept from his wife daydream of the way her hair fans across her pillow? Unfair or not, I would have believed a chaste detail like that more had it been written by a man.) Boone is constantly haunted by visions of his dead friends and family, giving a hallucinatory vibe to the story, and there's just very little said about the grit and grime of his actual existence. I do like the imagery in the following passage, but don't know if it feels authentic as the thoughts of a man of Boone's time as he faced down death:

All moved backwards now, there is no forward. A smell of wolf. Wolf's stomach. This is where I am again, then. I sigh and sink and the stinking wolf stomach cradles me in pieces. And I am so glad.

But the word will not let me be.

I flap my baby wings a little, this is the way my arms feel, weak as a new chicken's wings fresh out of the egg. They hurt to move, they hurt to unbend. I am trying to pull myself up out of the wolf's gut and its gullet, out of its throat and over its lolling tongue. The smell is sharper here, and the gate of the teeth is sharp.

I enjoyed the sections with Chief Black Fish and the other Shawnee – Hawley was able to depict the Natives as authentic people (neither monsters nor cliches) – and it was an interesting portrayal of a people facing down their own destruction; an interesting depiction of Boone leading the White folks into Kentucky without any evil intent of his own. And yet: even though Boone fought in the French and Indian wars, the American Revolution, and was around for the War of 1812; even though he blazed the Wilderness Trail through the Appalachians; even though his exploits were immortalised by James Fenimore Cooper and Lord Byron; even though he was a keen tracker and a crack shot, nothing in this book makes me think that Boone was much more than an early victim of celebrity; a common man after all. 

All True Not a Lie in It is an interesting, if not a traditional, frontier tale and even the winky title acknowledges that perhaps historical fact isn't the book's intent; but then what was the intent? I liked individual sections, but don't know if they add up to anything bigger in the end. I'd rate it 3.5 stars if I could and am rounding it down to rank this book against the other titles I've read on this year's Giller Prize longlist.

This is second title (along with The Winter Family) about the American Old West I've read from the Giller longlist -- and isn't that strange for a Canadian literary award?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



Later: I'm pretty excited that this year I was able to find and read the entire Giller Prize longlist before the winner is announced (with weeks to spare). If I were in charge, I'd give the prize to Martin John, and here is my ranked order of the contenders:

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in my order of ranking is:


Anakana Schofield - Martin John 
Marina Endicott - Close to Hugh
Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor
Heather O’Neill - Daydreams of Angels
Connie Gault - A Beauty 
André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family
Alix Hawley - All True Not a Lie in It
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Russell Smith - Confidence 
Samuel Archibald - Arvida 
Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

*Won by Fifteen Dogs; not my favourite but fine.