HARD HED

Hard Hed – The Hoosier Chapman Papers -A Review

Charles Tidler’s Hard Hed, a retelling of the Johnny Appleseed story, deftly moves back and forth through time, from the early nineteenth century right through to modern times.  It is a novel in five books.  Each book is unique in style and tone and together these individual sections form a compelling whole.  

Book one is a soldier’s diary of the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.   Accounts of hunting, fishing, daily allocation of rations and weather reports are punctuated with scenes of murder and ambush. Tidler’s contrasting of mundane daily ritual with violent skirmish heightens the sense of horror at a genocidal campaign that forced many surviving Native Americans out of the Indiana territories. Tidler has a gift for inventing details that feel authentic and immediate. In this respect he commands his readers’ attention as few fiction writers can. 

In book two we move to a contemporary setting. We are introduced to Hoosier Chapman, descendant of Johnny Appleseed, distant relative to the homicidal General Linkhorn introduced in book one.  Tidler’s mastery of prose is evinced in descriptions of the Indiana landscape i.e. “Red barn.  White farmhouse.  Rectangle of freshly mown sunshine.”   Hoosier with “mouth and lips a rainy branch of apple tree blossoms” has just been released from prison for planting apple trees illegally.  Traveling by bus through Indiana, the affable Hoosier meets beautiful university student Nancy Miami who declares herself “100% Indian, according to my daddy”.  A romance ensues.  The bus is torn apart by a tornado.  Hoosier survives in the first of a series of narrow escapes.  Nancy is later murdered.  In this section of the book there are thrilling shifts from realism to fantasy.  Tidler makes sublime transitions from scenes of sordid violence to scenes of sensuality and tenderness.  This is muscular erotic prose, brimming with vitality. 

The novel shifts back in time again to the Indian wars and the evolution of the Klu Klux Klan. We are introduced to Xerxes Chapman, purported cousin of John Applejack.  Xerxes lives off the land.  In book three, a sharp contrast is drawn between the Native Americans’ and Xerxes Chapman’s reverence for the natural world and General Linkhorn’s vicious campaign of wonton destruction and brutality. Yet In the face of this hard-edged subject matter there is sheer poetry.   Rarely is prose simultaneously so visceral, yet beautiful.   Book four shifts back to a modern setting. Cruelty towards ethnic minorities persists.  Hoosier Chapman who plants apple trees is also seen as a pariah.

The language in Hard Hed is poetic yet concise. Each sentence is exquisitely, meticulously crafted.  Tidler evokes his Midwestern roots with vivid descriptions of the Indiana landscape and the people who populate it.  The final book depicts a rebirth, a fitting metaphor for Johnny Appleseed. Hard Hed is an inventive, exciting novel that warrants multiple readings.