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Duke
DUKE, Sara Tilley's second novel, is inspired by the letters and diaries of her great-grandfather, William Marmaduke Tilly, who left Newfoundland in 1905 to try to earn enough money to get his father's business out of debt. Duke works his way across the United States, up to Vancouver, along the Yukon River and finally to Alaska, where he spends eight years in the interior toiling as a logger. When Duke returns home, his father turns inexplicably cold, locking Duke and his wife and newborn child out of the house in the dead of winter and banishing him from the community. A story of family obligation, repression and passion, ill health and ill luck, DUKE builds on the real Duke Tilly's ways of expressing himself to uncover a surprisingly contemporary fictional voice with large doses of humour, beauty and keen observation.
from amazon.ca
from amazon.ca
- GenresFiction
400 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 12, 2018
Duke revels in language that's poetic without being opaque. Tilley experiments with the novel structure but don't leave you feeling like you need a secret insider code. Her characters who give you heartache while they infuse your dreams with forests, wildlife, longing for beauty and goddamn moments of unaffected nakedness.
It's also so refreshing, as someone who lives in the Klondike (Yukon, Canada) to read a novel based on some of the Klondike Gold Rush events that doesn't slide into unthinking hero-worship of the stampeders.
It's also so refreshing, as someone who lives in the Klondike (Yukon, Canada) to read a novel based on some of the Klondike Gold Rush events that doesn't slide into unthinking hero-worship of the stampeders.
November 2, 2022
Undoubtedly one of the greatest novels I've ever read, detailing the highly fictionalized life of the author's great-grandfather, William Marmaduke "Duke" Till(e)y, from 1894 to 1955, who flees a tragic and abusive household in 1906 aged 18 or so, first to Massachusetts then Vancouver then the Yukon, and back home, only to deal with further tragedy and abuse.
July 25, 2015
Canada's Pedlar Press really do publish some interesting stuff. Last year I read Susan Downe's "fictional memoir" of her mother, Juanita Wildrose: My True Life, and now in a similar vein I've read Sara Tilley's 'Duke',another fictional memoir/ alternative family history, based on letters and log books written by her great grandfather William Marmaduke Tilly who, in 1906 left his home in Newfoundland to travel to the other side of the continent in order to join his elder brother Bob who (he was led to believe) had quite literally struck gold in Alaska. Apparently many of the real Duke's logbook entries were sketchy at best and some are quoted directly in the novel. For the rest Sara Tilley seems to have attempted to read between the lines of what he wrote, imagining a more complete journal or diary in his hand (so the entry "Intruder in camp", and the subsequent day's "Intruder dead" become a more detailed - and somewhat macabre - episode in the novel).
What is particularly fascinating is the way Tilley went about "channeling" the voice of Duke: she herself is trained in a clown technique (yes, really!) called Pochinko Clown through Mask and she employed this by making a papier mâché mask of Duke and wearing it throughout the writing of the novel. As with any art, it's a case of "whatever works for you", and clearly a lot of research went into the writing of the novel (her acknowledgments reference several books on slang of the era, for instance) but what she has achieved is an undeniably distinctive and consistent voice. In part this is helped by the slightly unusual way the book is written - a lack of punctuation, lots of capitalised words, long spaces instead of full stops, crossing outs - and this aspect does occasionally feel like a gimmick, since the book otherwise reads very easily and is quite conventional (though cleverly Duke at one point notes that actually he is quite well-read and the way he writes is an affectation - I don't know if this is invention on Sara Tilley's part or if she is quoting directly), but the unique look is certainly all part of why the novel succeeds.
The story itself hops about from Duke's childhood in the 1890s where he is fascinated by Jennie, the housemaid who is just a couple of years older, but is forbidden from forming any close attachment to her by his fierce and disciplinarian father; to the days prior to his leaving for Alaska, when he has met Emily, the young woman who is to be his wife; to later sections in the 1920s and 30s when he has a family of his own. But chiefly the book concerns itself with his adventures during the eight years he spends in Alaska, where - unsurprisingly - his brother hasn't made his fortune or found any gold, but is living the hand-to-mouth existence of trapper and woodsman.
There are themes here of survival, and of duty maintained at the expense of living life, and of the way we want to be remembered by our families . But at its heart this is a wonderful memorialising - whether it is all entirely true or not - of one man and his life at a particular point in history. It is by turns exciting, melancholy, bawdy and poignant, and if in the end it perhaps fails to reach any great conclusion, well then, neither does real life. A lovely read.
What is particularly fascinating is the way Tilley went about "channeling" the voice of Duke: she herself is trained in a clown technique (yes, really!) called Pochinko Clown through Mask and she employed this by making a papier mâché mask of Duke and wearing it throughout the writing of the novel. As with any art, it's a case of "whatever works for you", and clearly a lot of research went into the writing of the novel (her acknowledgments reference several books on slang of the era, for instance) but what she has achieved is an undeniably distinctive and consistent voice. In part this is helped by the slightly unusual way the book is written - a lack of punctuation, lots of capitalised words, long spaces instead of full stops, crossing outs - and this aspect does occasionally feel like a gimmick, since the book otherwise reads very easily and is quite conventional (though cleverly Duke at one point notes that actually he is quite well-read and the way he writes is an affectation - I don't know if this is invention on Sara Tilley's part or if she is quoting directly), but the unique look is certainly all part of why the novel succeeds.
The story itself hops about from Duke's childhood in the 1890s where he is fascinated by Jennie, the housemaid who is just a couple of years older, but is forbidden from forming any close attachment to her by his fierce and disciplinarian father; to the days prior to his leaving for Alaska, when he has met Emily, the young woman who is to be his wife; to later sections in the 1920s and 30s when he has a family of his own. But chiefly the book concerns itself with his adventures during the eight years he spends in Alaska, where - unsurprisingly - his brother hasn't made his fortune or found any gold, but is living the hand-to-mouth existence of trapper and woodsman.
There are themes here of survival, and of duty maintained at the expense of living life, and of the way we want to be remembered by our families . But at its heart this is a wonderful memorialising - whether it is all entirely true or not - of one man and his life at a particular point in history. It is by turns exciting, melancholy, bawdy and poignant, and if in the end it perhaps fails to reach any great conclusion, well then, neither does real life. A lovely read.
June 5, 2015
Much fun. Heard this read by the author at the March Hare at the Carleton in Halifax. Couldn't help but wish for he author's voice as I read - she made the humour of the accent and sentences really speak out. Newfoundland tale of a man who went away and came back, the familiar story of hardship and family dysfunction, but written in a cozy style as if Duke himself was sitting with you. Recommended.
May 14, 2016
Winner of the 2015 BMO Winterset Award. Finalist for the NL Book Awards: winner announced in JUNE 2016.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews