Deluded Your Sailors

by Michelle Butler Hallett

In Deluded Your Sailors, the culture industry is a weapon, a victim, and an opportunity, depending on the perspective of two main figures: the unsteady but perceptive Nichole Wright, whose discovery of crucial documents threatens a government-funded tourism project, and the politely menacing, shape-shifting Reverend Elias Winslow. And in parallel storytelling: an early eighteenth-century girl, daughter of a nameless prostitute, winds up first as object of depraved pleasure, espionage agent and courier, and finally captain of a Salem trading vessel. Her desperately threaded disguise holds until her unacknowledged past crashes into her frail present. Trapped, and finally forced to reveal many things kept hidden, she refuses to be exploited any further. But her defiance exacts a terrible cost.

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2011

About the author

Author's surname is Butler Hallett, not Hallett.
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Michelle Butler Hallett, she/her, writes fiction about violence, evil, love and grace. Author of the novels Constant Nobody, This Marlowe, deluded your sailors, Sky Waves and Double-blind, and the short story collection The shadow side of grace. Her short stories are widely anthologized in Hard Ol' Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Everything Is So Political, Running the Whale's Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014 . Michelle Butler Hallett lives in St. John's.
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Butler Hallett's work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, wrestles with themes of power, evil, complicity, illness, identity, hope, love, and grace.

2016's This Marlowe wrestles with the agonies of faith, duty, and love against a setting of religious and political turmoil, quotidian surveillance, widespread fear for security of one's country, questions of how to help an influx of refugees, the weight of the body politic, and the state of the soul. The Miramichi Reader calls This Marlowe "a masterful work of historical fiction," adding that the novel "assuredly has all the intrigue of a modern spy thriller." The Toronto Star notes "Butler Hallett's prose is at once canny and tender ... perfectly paced and gracefully wrought, This Marlowe is superior historical fare," while Quill & Quire remarked "Complex, lyrical, and with a profound sense of a world long passed and humanity’s eternal motivations, This Marlowe holds up extremely well next to the most lauded recent historical fiction."

Butler Hallett's 2011 novel, deluded your sailors, follows characters in early eighteenth-century England and colonies, as well as in a republic of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2009. Linked to her 2008 novel, Sky Waves, deluded your sailors stares down abuse, identity and friendship in a startling story of violence, loss and love.

In Sky Waves, Butler Hallett draws on her radio background and her troubled relationship with history to create an ambitious work. Described by the author as "a demented 'aural' culture novel," Sky Waves is told as a drew, that is, as the ninety-eight meshes in a row of a fishing net. Characters and storylines are networked together, almost as a mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005. The Maple Tree Literary Supplement called the novel "a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling, which complicates oral/aural tradition."

Double-blind, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunburst Award.The Sunburst jury said "Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science -- Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history... The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language."

Of the story collection The shadow side of grace, The Globe and Mail notes "demons are at work - the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality... Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors."

Reviews

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Butler Hallett is a distinctive writer with a commitment to her craft and her subject matter (in this case abuse, especially by those who write our histories, including our personal ones) that's rare in Canlit. In fact, this intense commitment reminded me of much of Melville's work. Deluded Your Sailors isn't the kind of novel that provides immediate rewards - the action (though there is plenty) evolves slowly and much of the drama revolves around the internal struggles of the several characters, but the end result is an impressive work that stays with the reader. There are two plotlines in DYS - a present day setting centering on a planned commemoration of the 250 years since Newfoundland was, well, newly found. The other is the 18th-century story of Matt Finn, a sea captain (or pirate) who isn't all he appears to be. Both timelines are handled well - populated with believable characters - and tie together without effort.

An under-appreciated writer whose work should have more than regional appeal.

[David]

As ever, any semblance of disinterestedness is impossible. deluded your sailors follows Sky Waves and also precedes it. It raises as many questions as it answers, and vice versa. Above all else, it calls into sharp debate all notions of 'history' and 'fiction' -- and may delude its readers, perhaps as well as itself, with respect to any plausible stance re the one/the other, and/or which is which. Informing everything is the threefold quest: 1) what do we want? 2) why are we so convinced that we want it? 3) what/who is blocking us from achievement (and why)?

[Jeff Bursey]

Did an interview with Hallett here:

http://www.winnipegreview.com/wp/2014...

She talks about dys there, and many other things.