Like her previous two novels, Newfoundland author Michelle Butler Hallett’s latest defies genre classification and presents the reader with an unusual structure. The plot spans three centuries and numerous locales, while the narration combines third-person omniscience with letters, memos, newspaper articles, and mock oral storytelling. The result is a challenging, though not entirely satisfying, exploration of cultural politics that combines historical adventure, speculative fiction, and contemporary realism.         

Deluded Your Sailors begins and ends in the same setting as Hallett’s previous novel, Sky Waves: a contemporary Newfoundland that exists as its own republic independent of Canada. Several characters from Sky Waves also return, including novelist Nichole Wright, visual artist Gabriel Furey, and academic Dorinda Masterson. The narrative that bookends the new novel concerns “Settlement 250,” a government initiative designed to lure tourists with a lavish celebration of 250 years of European settlement on the island.

Wright, who struggles with mental health issues as a result of sexual abuse, is commissioned to write a play about the original settlement. The project provides a welcome focus, but matters become complicated when she unearths details that conflict with the official history propagated by the Historical Accuracy Reproduction Committee.

The source material on which Wright bases her play constitutes the historical adventure narrative at the centre of the novel. The story concerns the 18th-century settlement of Port au Mal, a remote fishing community, and features several shipwreck survivors who wash up there, including an androgynous youngster who grows up to become a sea captain, disguising her gender so that she may inhabit the man’s world in which she thrives.

Hallett has a good command of language and character; there are many fine prose passages and evidence of an impressively inventive imagination at work throughout. But in its ambitious historical and geographical breadth, the novel often eschews context and description in favour of rapidly advancing its myriad plotlines. The result is an accumulation of names, places, and dates demanding a level of attentiveness that will give many readers pause.