The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

You know when Amazon sends you those messages about a title ‘you may have missed’? Well, I remembered seeing The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt years ago (almost 12 to be almost precise) but somehow missed out on reading it at the time. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, so many other readers presumably didn’t.

It was the title that drew me in: simple but wanting me to read the publisher’s blurb and an albeit mixed bag of reviews. Having downloaded The Librarianist to my online book pile which never seems to go down, I thought I’d catch up with this title first – deWitt’s second – and head over to the west coast America of the 1850s.

Eli Sisters is the narrator of this tale of gunmen for hire – himself and his brother Charles – who head down from their base in Oregon to the state of California which has had its proverbial head shaken by the fanaticism of gold prospectors. We get a real sense of Western life – basic, filthy and unerringly tough – as our partners in crime attempt to track down their prey - Hermann Kermit Warm – whom their sponsor (the mysteriously named ’Commodore’) has decreed must die.

There are fight scenes, shootings, a one-eyed horse and lots of alcohol along the way which take us through saloons, campfires and clearings by rivers where the usually elusive search for gold is fired by man’s determination to satisfy his greed. The characters are well-drawn rather than caricatures of the age and I easily found myself present on these stages (thankfully, merely observing the action).

This may be a homage to the Western form, but there is so much more to the book, written in short chapters that keep us all moving along. It is a celebration of the brothers’ differences in that Eli – a gentle, empathetic soul who has deepening reservations of what it is that they are paid to do – and Charles who is the alpha brother with a psychopathic mindset always threatening to run to excess. And yet, the blood that remains in the bodies of brothers may be thicker after all.

However, about a third of the way through the book, something clicked and, yes, it was one of those flashes of clarity that even the glinting prospect of gold had not illuminated. The writing was beautiful – outstanding even – but not at all how characters from that time, that background would have spoken. It felt like I was on the set of a Tarantino film – just as funny and just as mind-blowing. The language could have been used by two gentlemen in the drawing room of a Victorian country house at precisely the same time. Once I grasped this, I allowed myself to be taken on an unexpected journey through a valley of discovery I didn’t want to complete, even if they did by the end.
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Like so many real-life drifters during this period, I felt the story fell away a little towards the end, but not until after we’d struck gold.

I could pop over to Prime now to view the movie version of this book, but I won’t. I’d prefer to see the characters as they were originally painted rather than through a reproduction. Perhaps I’ll attack that list of more unread books instead and head for The Librarianist.

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