His name is Yip — and it's one you won't forget

Paddy Crewe’s debut novel is set in northern Georgia and the mountains of Tennessee in the early years of the 19th century. My Name Is Yip is an adventure story, a tale of struggle against great odds, a paean to the power of friendship. Its narrator is unable to speak — and so he learns to communicate with slate and chalk. “My name is Yip Tolroy & I am a mute,” his account begins. “I have made not a sound since the day of my birth, October 2nd, 1815. I will say that my life has been something of a trial but such is God’s wish & so I must tell my story here on the page.”

Yip grows, but never gets any taller than 4 feet eight inches. Not only is he mute, he is entirely hairless, a pale oddity in his community. His mother Ellen struggles to manage his needs — it is reading and writing which transform his life. Then when he is just 15, his life is altered irrevocably when he witnesses the discovery of gold in the local creek — and commits a grievous crime that leaves him with no choice but to flee. Thrust into a world of violence embarks on an odyssey across the wonder and horror of the American frontier.

Yip’s trials are the reader’s delight. Upon its British publication it was Historical Fiction Book of the Month in the London Times; “startlingly original… extraordinary and vivid… sensational,” wrote Antonia Senior. Jude Cook in the Guardian called it an “ambitious, cinematic debut… a rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist.” It’s published now in the United States by The Overlook Press, and I spoke to Paddy to mark the occasion.

First: full disclosure. I’ve had my eye on this book, and this author, for a long time. Before I took up my post as Lead Editorial Innovator at Creatd — Vocal’s parent company — I was teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London. That was where I first saw a very, very early version of My Name is Yip; I knew from the get-go that this was a writer to watch.

But even I was surprised when I learned of one of Paddy’s chief inspirations for the novel. Certainly, this novel was influenced by the likes of Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger. But Yip and his endearing companion Dud Carter find a parallel in — wait for it — Nick Park’s brilliant animated characters, Wallace and Gromit. Yes, Wallace — that doughty Lancashire inventor and his silent partner-in-escapade, Gromit the dog. Park’s stop-motion animated films — A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers — have won millions of fans around the world, not to mention slews of awards and the odd Oscar. But what could this pair have to do with the days of the American frontier?

“I became fascinated by Gromit,” Paddy says, “and his role within a story — despite the fact that he can’t speak. The audience connects with him on so many levels, and yet he never says a single thing. I realized that how Gromit’s engaged with the world would obviously be incredibly different — bearing in mind I’m talking about a clay dog here! — to the way I would connect with the world and engage with it.” That fascination, along with the discovery that there had been a little-known gold rush in Georgia decades before the more famous California gold rush, were the kindling that fired his creativity.

Paddy is a writer who wants to move as far away from himself as possible in his work. Students are writing are often told “write what you know”: that doesn’t interest Crewe. “I want to be imagining myself into a position that I’m unfamiliar with,” he says. “It’s too tempting to sort of stick to what you know, to feel comfortable and at ease: and I don’t want any of those things.” He smiles a little wryly. “I want to feel ill at ease, I want to feel slightly on edge. Then, I think, that’s when you know you’re doing something worthwhile.” I’ve heard this described in other words as “productive discomfort”: the knowledge that you’re stretching yourself beyond where you feel safe and settled. My own former writing teacher was the brilliant British novelist Rose Tremain: she used to tell us, Don’t write what you know… write what you want to know.

On the surface Paddy Crewe and Yip Tolroy are separated by much more than a century and a half. Paddy was born 31 years ago in Middlesborough, in the North East of England; he keeps the place in his heart — and in his accent, which remains inflected with the flat vowels and hard consonants of his native territory. All the more remarkable, perhaps, that he should have found such a convincing first-person narrative voice for Yip — and the other garrulous characters who populate this tale — but his passion for his task drew him onward. The language in this book is a delight, inventive yet disciplined, influenced by research, literature and history but wholly original too. “Them days after that night by the creek & my Mama’s words by the fire, the world did seem to fall quiet on itself. Each morning I rose to a songless dawn, the birds was flown to warm their feathers under a distant sun & our lush country was suddenly locked in ice, the air so cold it stung your teeth to breathe it,” Yip tells his readers. The audiobook is brilliantly read by the American actor Sean Bridgers (Deadwood, Rectify) who grew up not far from where the book is set.

“You’re sort of pushing the language, pulling it and stretching it around,” Paddy says now. “You write one sentence and somehow it reminds you of something and leads you to the next place.” He’s a big admirer of Tom Waits; he recalls an interview in which Waits spoke of hearing a metal stool dragged across the floor of the studio in which he was recording. Another artist might find that intrusive; for Waits it was inspirational. Paddy searches high and low to find work that keeps him on his mettle; it’s often not what you would expect. He loves David Lynch’s weather report — the director’s online ramblings (that really is the best word) about, yes, the weather in Los Angeles and anything else that’s on his mind. “It makes me smile,” Paddy says. “To see someone who obviously just couldn’t give a monkey’s cuss about what anybody thinks — that’s completely liberating.”

Paddy is hard at work on his second novel — set in the 19th century, set in England, though he declines to say more. He’s writing full-time these days, having been a barman and builder in his time. When he’s not at his desk, I know from experience that he’s fond of the pub — he’s got good tips on how to sniff out the good ones. He likes to dance, he likes to run. Don’t be fooled by his literary desire to be put himself on edge; he's good company. And — he’s also worked as a curator for Vocal, judging our challenges with his discerning eye. He has words of encouragement for Vocal’s creators.

To build your skills and your writing practice, habit is important, he notes. Paddy’s early years were spent largely on the sports field — the discipline he learned from training he now applies to his work. “Create a little structure for yourself,” he says. “You want a routine that doesn’t have to be too strenuous to begin with — it can just be an hour a day. But if you make sure that it’s actually something that you do every day, quicker than you think it will just become part of your life and you’d find it odd if you didn’t do it.”

And while he has nothing against writing as a form of self-discovery, he believes that there is much to be gained from turning one’s writerly gaze outward. “I would argue you would learn just as much, if not more, about yourself by going elsewhere and being somebody else. If you do that, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t holding up the mirror to yourself; I’m pretty sure that you will end up finding a lot about yourself if you do that.” He has one more vital tip: “Read all you can.”

And importantly he argues too that one’s measure of success must — in the end — be internal. Paddy is thrilled that My Name Is Yip is out in the world, but he would be at his desk no matter what. It’s the process that gives him joy, even when the day’s work seems hard. “There are times when you feel like you’re struggling; and then you look back on it and think, ‘Actually, it was really important that I did that, because that’s now led me in the right direction.’ At the time you think, ‘God, this is absolutely naff and what’s the point in even sitting there if you’re just going to write garbage like that?’” He laughs. “But then suddenly it all seems to make sense.”

My Name Is Yip is published in the US by The Overlook Press and in the UK by Doubleday.