‘Duke’ by Sara Tilley

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

A dense and challenging but wonderfully rewarding—and technically impressive—novel of (mostly) shuffled journal entries that date from June 30, 1893 to April 24, 1955, Sara Tilley’s sophomore effort had its roots in the Tilley family’s past. In her acknowledgements she mentions a 2004 visit to a property in Elliston, NL that her dad had inherited. After her father managed to pry open a stuck cupboard the two discovered “a mass of family letters, log books, postcards and ledgers, as well as magazines, school primers, medical texts and other documents dating back to the 1880s.” Composing “a work of fiction from those pages,” Tilley crafts a misadventure story, a dark family history, and a heroic tale of “Reckoning” that’s all the more affecting because it’s such a failure.

Tilley introduces her distant relative when he’s barely an adult. Foreboding, William Marmaduke Tilly (b. 1884) is walking with a limp and leaning on a stick thrice engraved with “HELL & SIN.” On the surface he’s the dutiful son of a hard, selfish, and unforgiving paterfamilias (Old Testament-style), who has kicked him out for an as yet unnamed betrayal. (When Duke recalls his father catching him masturbating—“Do you wish to Burn Alone in Hell Forever, Son? For that is what you’re after”—he hints that his ‘crime’ was somehow sexual in nature.) He’s making amends in foreign territories; and all the while he plans to help pay off his father’s debts.

With the exception of brief third-person chapters called “Her Adolescence” that conclude four of the book’s five sections, tracing the miserable days of his daughter in Newfoundland, it’s Tilly (and, in 1914, suddenly Tilley) who gives a harrowing and lusty account of his travels, very little of which is comfortable or picturesque. There’s arriving in Dawson City, where, he writes, “The Laws Are Near As Loose As The Women”:

The wooden boardwalks are raised up high & I can see this could be a treacherous town to be spit-drunk in, what with the fall to the muck below & that muck soft enough to sink into & pass out & plenty willing to crawl down after & take a wander through your pockets I reckon.”

Across the way, there’s Louse Town, with its saloon entertainment and prostitution.

Or, there’s the northward voyage on a steamship (“anyway if brief bouts of Friendship with Women yanks your crank then I suppose the steamships are straight from Heaven as a means of working, if you’re strong & you don’t mind them ship’s quarters with the hammocks swinging & the men stacked one on the other for want of space & all of them sweating & smoking & drinking & boiling tea up & all of them smells heating up together in the closed-in quarters & turning into a thick hot blanket of complicated stench like a gone-off kettle of stew”).

Duke arrives in the District of Alaska envisioning abundant gold and a short stay, but naturally finds nothing but Bob, a hostile and stony elder brother, brutal fellow men, oppressive and inescapable weather, vicious insects, and an eight-year sentence. Unprepared for the hardship and loneliness, he sinks into despair and “Painkiller” by the corked bottle, the latter a serious habit for the rest of his days. He also discovers that earnest attempts for what he calls “My Betterment” are sabotaged by the severity of tundra living: “Alaska makes the spirit Wild & it’s like your Virtues wash away till you’re nothing but a skeleton clothed in Vices, each one sourer than the last.”

A former “salt-soaked bumpkin from Newfoundland” and a “real Rush Lad” who arrived well after all the gold had been scooped up, Duke often writes half-mad from solitude and with a “Lightly Lubricated Mind.” Addressing his deceased mother (from whom he inherited his condition as a “Delicate Sort”), he wonders if anyone ever escapes their past (and, in his case, the thumb of his stern, wrathful father):

(Yes, that kind of thinking do not Quit you no matter how Old you gets & how many things you have been through)           we all got these Glaciers on the inside, or icebergs              massive, ancient, frozen Hurts that even the hottest, wildest type of Living cannot fully melt away from us        we all have them          for some of us we takes it different than for some others

Duke’s journals also contain revelatory material that’s been scratched out. From vengeful to philosophically-minded, they add depth to a man who by light of day strives to be helpful, kind, and virtuous. Ranging from thoughts on masturbation (“It is a Thing A Boy needs now & again, so he do not turn Mean”) to existence itself (IS IT ALL THERE IS? IS THIS IT?), he’s at once insightful and nihilistic. Facing loneliness, long stretches of cold, or circumstances that encourage angry introspection, Duke rails (frequently) against the Holy Father (FUCK YOU GOD YOU GOT NO SENSE OF DECENCY), his own father, and, once he returns to Newfoundland, his (dead) wife (“YOU BITCH YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BEAT ME LIKE I WERE A DOG”). Often too, he catalogues his self-perceptions, many of which are variations on the “NOTHING that is my Life” theme:

I am Slug

Where’er I Make My Path in Life

I Ooze My Poison

Just in case the cautious reader turns Duke’s letters and journals into a perfectly coherent and fully comprehensible story, Sara Tilley throws in occasional twists. This, for example:

I do not write the real substance of my days    I cannot put on the page the other things that have happened & are true & which do haunt me        so this list of rabbits caught & cords chopped must serve as a record of my Life, pathetic as that is, a life added up in fur & lumber, unwritten loneliness & the feeling that I am losing what little was left of myself, of that real Self with me.

And there’s another, a taunt for readers circa 1955 that gleefully raises questions of veracity and authenticity that Duke ultimately chooses against answering:

“(Yes         even if I says a thing or two all wrong for school, I done my reading      & the bad grammar is Affected, not Ingrained if you MUST KNOW).”

Whatever the original found documents might have been, Sara Tilley has alchemized them and given her readers a fascinating, momentous, and complexly layered vision of the past. The novel’s a feat that any writer would be proud of and fans of literary fiction will enjoy.

Pedlar | 400 pages | $22.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-1897141687