Red Knife by William Kent Krueger (2008. Atria. ISBN 978-1-4165-5675-6)
There is no question that Krueger is one of Minnesota’s most beloved and avidly read authors. Along with Brian Freeman, John Sanford, and Vince Flynn, he forms the North Star State’s pantheon of mystery/detective/thriller writers with national audiences. There is also little question that this author can put fingers to keyboard and create stellar work. Witness my review of Ordinary Grace (see the “Reviews” tab above and click “Books” or use this blog’s search function at the upper right) wherein I wrote:
Anytime an author writes outside his or her genre and tries something new, regardless of the result, they deserve respect. Here, Krueger, much like John Grisham did with A Painted House not only tested the waters of literary fiction but he swam confidently across them.
I rated Ordinary Grace 5 stars out of 5, a level of esteem for a writer that few achieve in my reviews. So when my aunt and fellow writer, Susanne Schuler, mailed me her copy of Red Knife, I was eager to take up the fictional journey of Krueger’s Irish/Ojibwe protagonist, Cork O’Connor. I hadn’t visited the fictional town of Aurora, Minnesota (not to be confused with the actual NE Minnesota locale by that name) since Purgatory Ridge, the second book in the series. I was hoping that the tired writing that eventually enters into all successful authors of a series had been reinvigorated and ingrained with the literary tenor of Grace. Unfortunately, it hadn’t.
It’s not that Red Knife isn’t well written. There’s no question this author knows how to lay down sentences into paragraphs into pages into chapters. But rather than being propelled along by a suspenseful, engaging plot, I found myself sort of drifting through the story, like the canoe on the book’s cover. The players, including Cork, pretty much emulate cutouts standing inside a child’s dollhouse; there’s little unveiling of their inner demons, their pasts, their dreams. I found myself feeling like, as one reviewer wrote on Amazon, watching actors reading lines on a movie set rather than having all my senses engaged in the active task of reading. In addition, the citizen reviewers who have taken Krueger to task for the simplistic and bloody ending are right on: The carnage doesn’t add anything to the story and it goes against type that Cork O’Connor, a generally virtuous protagonist, would suddenly capitulate and join in the slaughter.
I also wonder about the Ojibwe community of Minnesota and how they view this tale. Not that folks who write shouldn’t attempt to write outside their experiences. So far as I know, Mr. Krueger isn’t Native American, or at least, not a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Lacking an ethnic tie to a racial or cultural group being portrayed in a novel isn’t a bar to writing about that group. Hell, in Esther’s Race, I wrote in the first person as an African American, twenty-something, female nurse. If anyone can be criticized for writing about a culture, a skin, that he knows nothing about it would be me. It can be done but it is, I fear, a very delicate task to write outside of one’s ethnicity and gender. Simply tossing a few Ojibwe words or cultural and spiritual references into the mix doesn’t save this tale from coming off as condescending and false. One white man’s view. Others may disagree.
This is a spoiler alert: If you are going to read the book, skip this paragraph! Then there is the final scene in the book. I can’t really explain why the author decided to take a very minor character, a young Goth teen who was a friend of one of the other more visible teens in the story, and make him the centerpiece of a wholly unrelated, exploitative, and unnecessary second coda. Darrell Gallagher’s swan song, where the disaffected youth shoots up the high school Cork’s daughter Annie attends, mimics, in very deliberate ways, actual events that took place at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northwestern Minnesota in 2005. It is unsettling that Krueger didn’t bother to disguise his lifting of the facts and circumstances of that tragic day whole cloth from newspaper accounts in attempt to further sensationalize his fictional story. The addition of the final scene adds absolutely nothing to the main plot. I’ll give you that it’s well written and worthy of exploration in its own right, perhaps with the deft hand and sensibility shown by Krueger in Ordinary Grace, but that’s not what the author does with that scene in this novel.
This is not a terrible book. But as I’ve said in the past regarding other well known authors, the question to be asked is: If the name on the cover wasn’t William Kent Krueger, would this story have been published? Just wondering.
3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
Peace.
Mark
