Book Review of My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe

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A morally complex adventure set in a “difficult” part of America’s history.

This is a well-researched novel set in Virginia and Tennessee when they were still frontier states, around 1830. This is not a very popular era for American authors and screenwriters at the moment, perhaps because it’s before slavery was widely seen as wrong in America but well after the point where the British could be blamed for all evil. At no point is any form of professional law-enforcement encountered by anyone in the story and I think that is probably quite authentic. The main protagonist, the “Yip” of the title has a very strong sense of right and wrong, of kindness and cruelty. His sidekick, Dud Carter, has a more flexible idea or right and wrong, but is still capable of kindness and selfless bravery. But the terms “legal” and “illegal” simply do not occur. Neither does any form of paper money play any role. The scene is set for pure adventure, where happiness is always something in the future, after cruelty, danger and tragedy have been faced.

Yip is mute since birth and all his life, but he learns to read and write and this gives him a voice which some of his illiterate neighbours do not have. Slavery and racism are starkly depicted, but the reality is that master and slave are defined by social convention because the law, which did allow slavery on paper, is completely absent from everyday life and people do what they have the strength to get away with and they tend to test that limit until they meet someone stronger. Handicapped or disadvantaged white people can be and are exploited as ruthlessly as black ones.

Gold is discovered and the first consequence is a brutal murder, which sets a trend. The inevitable gold-rush attracts many desperate people, because this is not a society where paper money, bank accounts and abstract concepts of wealth have any standing at all. Everybody hopes to get rich, but even if substantial amounts of gold were there to be discovered, there are simply too many hands at work for anyone much to be better off than they would have been if they had stuck to their old jobs.

The single-minded desperation of so many people in a tiny town with almost no resources other than the promise of gold, where there is no regulation or law enforcement, cannot possibly end well and happiness (and sanity) can be found only by Yip turning his back on his home town and the gold-rush and walking away.

My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe is published in the UK by Random House on the 5^th of May 2022