The Sisters Brother by Patrick deWitt

Posted on: May 03, 2012

The Sisters Brother by Patrick deWitt

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

Although 2011’s Booker nominees all bore witness to the judges desire to acknowledge ‘readable’ books, the short listed novels were from a wide number of genres. Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is one of these books, a picaresque adventure set in the American gold rush of the 1850s. Although Westerns have never had a large appeal outside of genre readers, deWitt has written a fun homage using the classic tropes without alienating readers who are not fans of the genre. As with many Westerns, here there are murderers and marauders, poisoners and prospectors, brothels full of wayward women and saloons full of skulking cowboys all caught up in an action packed fast moving plot.

 

The titular brothers are Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of hired guns and henchmen for The Commodore, a merciless, frightening and mysterious man in a merciless, lawless environment. The brothers have been sent to kill a man called Herman Kermit Warm who is later found to be in the possession of a formula of some alchemical genius. Of course, there are adventures to be had along the way, and deWitt is precise in his layout of the book: it is an episodic novel, with each chapter a tight little story in itself, all crafted together with intelligence and very, very taut.

DeWitt is most concerned with the fraternal relationship and the brothers are tied together by blood, in more ways than the obvious. Eli and Charlie are almost stereotypical dichotomous on the surface: Eli is plump, sensitive, prone to many doubts, many emotional inner monologues and is a reluctant (albeit cold blooded) assassin. Charlie is confrontational, often drunk and always ready for a good fight to the kill. Both are quick on the draw and are collectively well known across the land as the infamous Sister’s Brothers, mercenaries, and guns for hire – always lethal. As different as they are the bond between the brothers and the huge differences in their personalities is given away wonderfully right at the very start of the narrative, in a passage about Eli being bitten by a spider and Charlie coming to his rescue.

Even for those who are not familiar with Westerns may know that cowboys are not usually afraid of spiders, but deWitt writes that it occurred to him that there were ‘no neurosis in westerns’ and so he subverts the genre traditionally known for its cold, bare bones machismo. Here is a sensitive cowboy, Eli, who is full of neurosis. He is afraid he’s too fat to be attractive to women, so he goes on a diet, eschewing the standard cowboy fare of biscuits and rashers of bacon; he’s strangely attached to this newfound discovery of tooth brushing; he throws his heart away to every woman he meets and he’s very concerned with his ‘profile, the line [he] cuts in the world of men and ladies’. It is absurd and hilarious, and in Eli, deWitt has created a refreshingly reliable, observant narrator.

There is never a doubt that Eli’s perspective is anything other than fair because he never falters, even though much of the plot sheds a terrible light on his and Charlie’s characters and their actions. Of course, once it is evident that the brothers are assassins, an entirely different moral code is placed upon them – both by deWitt and his readers. Eli and Charlie are not judged on every murder they commit. In fact it is easy to accept who and what they are. What is not easy is for a writer to have created a character as likeable as Eli while making sure Eli is essentially an amoral, cold blooded murderer. In one gruesome episode, deWitt has Eli crush to pulp the already bullet-shattered skull of a man with his boot heel, ‘caving in what was left of the skull’. There is no ambiguity here – neither of the brothers is at all morally concerned with their lifestyle because they accept who they are and what they do. And yet it is hard for the reader to judge them, perhaps because of Eli’s sweetly sensitive, deadpan humour or the hilarity of Charlie’s drunken antics and his ridiculous morning after purging and regrets. Either way, there is a great deal of empathy in the book, both between the brothers and between them and the readers.

Although deWitt cleverly pins the narrative down in time and space with his description of life in the Old West, he is not deeply concerned with the history of the times or the area beyond a basic setting for the story, although it full to bursting with the atmosphere, particularly in the scenes set in San Francisco. deWitt is mostly concerned with developing the narrative for what it is – a story of true brotherhood and loyalty. The Old West is painted well in the book, but it is not a glossy picture; rather, it is painted with dust and grit, grease paint and horse dung. It is a violent story full of death, lust and theft. There are strange, almost surreal moments that mark the dusty landscape the brothers travel  - a man who weeps, a beautiful thoroughbred runaway horse, the body of a murdered Native American, a prospector who makes tea from earth – everything ties in neatly without being boring or without alienating even a reader who is not familiar with the genre. Even when things appear to have stabilised in the narrative, The Sisters Brothers remains an unsettling novel. 

Besides being on the Booker shortlist, The Sisters Brothers won the Governor General Award inCanada and film rights to the story have been sold to multiple Academy Award nominee John C. Reilly’s film company, with the actor having already stated he himself will play Eli. This makes perfect sense, for this is indeed a cinematic novel, with deWitt a dab hand at showing, not telling. The laconic prose is perfectly matched to the bleak landscape and the gallows humour. The narrative, like the brothers themselves, is at times, endearing, sensitive; and often brutal and devastating. With The Sisters Brothers, deWitt may not have written a classic Western, but what he’s written will probably be enjoyed by a far larger audience.