The Booker Shortlist: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

I don’t mind admitting that last week’s slightly disappointing read shook my estimation of the judgment of this year’s Booker panel. I was a bit concerned though that I might struggle to approach the next novel on the list without prejudice, particularly as I had designed to move onto the first western to make the award’s shortlist, i.e. another suspicious inclusion. After a short deliberation however, in which I pondered whether or not to read Barnes first instead, I decided that I have the utmost faith in my own magnanimity. So this week, I present an entirely equable and judicious review of Patrick DeWitt’s Sisters Brothers.

The Sisters Brothers follows Eli and Charlie Sisters on a sort-of-picaresque romp across the 1850’s west, in their bid to kill the enigmatic Hermann Kermit Warm, while in service to a man known only as ‘the Commodore’. I say ‘sort-of-picaresque’ because while the protagonists are indisputably roguish, they do strain the definition of lovable somehow. Narrated by Eli Sister’s, the fatter one with moral tendencies, the book is in a plain prose style and vacillates quickly between depictions of hyper-violence, drunkenness and debauchery, and the narrator’s ruminating on a mid-career existential trauma that is piqued by a career demanding… well, hyper-violence, drunkenness and debauchery. So far, so-so.

It’s actually quite good though. It has a filmic quality that has been compared elsewhere to the movies of the Coen Brothers. And I can’t find a better comparison than that so I’m forced to do the same, although I think it probably also owes something to Quentin Tarantino’s work. Eli isn’t exactly a cultured narrator, but DeWitt is confident in his portrayal of him as such, and one consequence of this scarcity is that DeWitt has to rely on the dialogue to communicate expressively, which he does surprisingly well. Between the clipped and simplistic brotherly ejections there is something more profound, sequestered in the spaces. The dramatic irony present throughout The Sisters Brothers makes up for the limitations of the narrator, and DeWitt manages to compress his ideas pithily in the unsaid.

It’s also pretty funny, which in my view is where the Tarantino connection comes in — for, as violent as it is, the violence is somehow unreal, made light of by its bounty. You can’t help but laugh when, after Charlie points out the necessity of a number of tidy-up murders, Eli blithely amends the bromidic assertion that ‘it will be the last bit of bloodshed for [his] foreseeable future’ to it simply being a ‘final era of killing’. It’s with this proclivity towards the unexpected that DeWitt really impresses. The Sisters Brothers concerns itself significantly with the accumulation of money and, through Eli’s bemused misuse of it, attacks the dogmatic conflation of money and happiness. You’d expect then that, being set during the 1850s gold rush, it would make great use of the historical context, but no. Apart from the inevitable incidental aspects, DeWitt completely eschews it. That’s what I like about DeWitt, it’s almost as though he’s baiting you. He’ll consciously work towards the trite and expected and you’ll think, ‘Aha! Too obvious, Mr DeWitt!’ but then at the very last moment he’ll triumphantly kick it down. And you feel stupid for being so premature.

The Sisters Brothers does have a weakness though, which is that it’s too short. And I don’t mean that in a gushing ‘I couldn’t get enough of it’ kind of way, it really is too short. Don’t get me wrong; some novels can get away with being short, but The Sisters Brothers just can’t. Communicating complex ideas is always going to be a challenge when the narrator isn’t particularly good at communicating, and DeWitt does it well. But when the message is so carefully parcelled in the interstices of words, then space becomes an issue. The ideas need the time to accrue by increments; to fractionally wash away, scour and reform; and to develop shades and complexity. Normally I take great pain to avoid revealing the greater turns of theme and the intellectual resolution, but in this case I feel no such compunction. The dominance of Charlie is broken, and the brothers seemingly mend their ways. The path of the novel is blindingly obvious from the outset and, tragically, the big, ugly flaw in what would otherwise have been a great book is the antithesis to that which I’d previously thought to be DeWitt’s greatest strength.

The Booker Shortlist: Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

You always expect the Booker to throw up a few surprises, as the passing judges inevitably strive to leave their own mark on the award. But this year’s shortlist in particular has been especially unexpected, with the inclusion of the award’s first western and not one but two books from debut novelists. The first of the debuts that I’m going to look at sees A.D. Miller, who is by day an editor for the Economist, telling a gritty Russian tale of post-communist corruption in Snowdrops.

Somewhat predictably the response to Snowdrops has been mixed with some praising the unconstrained approach of the judging panel and others lamenting its inclusion at the expense of other strong runners. Somewhere in amongst all the knee-jerk and snobbish vitriol though there is an important question: is this book really a genuine contender for this year’s strongest work of novelistic literary art, or rather just headline fodder from a panel looking for a quick reputation?

Snowdrops does have a very aesthetic appeal, with bleakly evocative descriptions of a decaying Russia gripped by parasitism and duplicity, against which Miller sketches a highly original morality tale. Recounted as a first-person confessional, and addressed to the narrator’s bride-to-be, it tells of the final year of a British expatriate’s experience working for a Moscow-based law firm. Primarily though, the focus is on the seduction and eventual betrayal of the narrator by an icily quintessential Russian girl, Masha. The more than slightly suspect dealings of the law firm meanwhile are woven in as a parallel subplot.

Deeply atmospheric, Snowdrops uses the harsh Russian winter to great effect, piling on the snow as the layers of deceit accrue. Meanwhile, sensuously contrasting depictions of eroticism are deployed to blur the line between passion and seediness, or good and bad, in the book’s underpinning conceit, of morality being lost in a snowstorm. The idea presented is that morality is transient, that we are capable of astonishing oversight and tenuous self-rationalisation when the reward is personal gain, which is enormously appealing as a literary theme. And no doubt Miller’s experience as a journalist has contributed to his ability to structure a narrative, as the book is thematically well realised and the sense of menace and dislocation is ratcheted up expertly with the deepening winter.

There’s something rough about Snowdrops though — it feels like a first novel. It goes beyond genre fiction, and it’s indeed better than the average crime novel, but it’s flawed. Overwritten perhaps. When it’s at its best, Snowdrops is brooding and impressive, but Miller doesn’t quite seem to know when to stop. Often you’ll read a passage that is darkly suggestive by its dialogue alone, but then Miller goes and ruins it by drowning it in overly sentimental reflection. And then there are the wince-inducing similes, which occur all too frequently. Albeit with a relentless heterogeneity that seems to lull you into believing that you might just be past the worst of it. Its greatest failing though is that it’s too perfectly contrived; it doesn’t have enough of a sense of irresolution or ambiguity about it to let it develop of it’s own. Miller’s presence is stifling to the point of being limiting.

I know that I'm being harsh, but it’s important to consider it in terms of its viability as a candidate for the Booker. As a first time novelist Miller certainly has potential, and the novel would be better from a good edit alone. In fact, you can actually see him developing as a novelist as the book progresses; it literally improves as you read it. But then that’s not really what you want in a novel that is supposed to be among the very best that the Commonwealth has to offer. I personally find it hard to believe that this can really compete with works this year from the likes of Alan Hollinghurst and Julian Barnes. A.D. Miller is certainly one to watch, but for me this one was a mistake.

The plan, which is liable to change.

Over the next 6 weeks I'm going to be doing a series of reviews on this year's Man Booker shortlist. Obviously they won't be done in time for the announcement of the winner, which is largely (entirely) due to the mind-bendingly rapid service offered by the Guardian Bookshop, who only took 5 weeks to deliver my books. Such is life though, and I shall probably just treat it as though I don't know who the winner is (although I probably will). As usual it's a contentious list, so I'll assume readability and focus mainly on artistic merit.

I'll try and get the first review up by Wednesday.

Oh, and after that I might do a feature on last year's Man Booker. This is a cop-out, as I've already read them. But I really need to make some time to read Paradise Lost. It'll probably work out okay anyway, as they're all on bargain book stands now, so they could be cheap, good reads. Or not. You'll have to wait and see.

A.S. Byatt's Ragnarok: The End Of The Gods — A Review

As one of this country’s most celebrated literary authors, it almost seems to be the expectation that that A.S. Byatt’s novels will impress. Her latest book however presents a peculiar challenge in that, strictly speaking, it is not a novel. As part of the Canongate series of retold myths, Ragnarok sees Byatt relating the eponymous Norse destruction tale. In which the Gods of Asgard, under the leadership of Odin, march inexorably towards a ruinous confrontation with Loki the Trickster and a multifarious coalition of bestial progeny, Titanesque Giants and primeval prosopopoeia.

While other authors in the series have chosen to ‘novelise’ the form — developing mythical characters and themes towards the complexity typically found in the novel — Byatt, as she freely admits in the afterword, has instead decided to tell the story in its more primitive form. As this could potentially present quite a serious challenge for a writer trying to create something unique and personal, it is interesting then to see how she fared.

The first thing that you notice, if not already familiar with the source material, is just how much of a gift the original Norse mythology is to a talented writer — the story is rich in animism and anthropomorphic metaphor with wolves chasing the sun and the moon across the sky and the sky itself made from the skull of an ice giant, felled by Odin and his brothers. And, like their ancient Grecian forebears, the Gods are wonderfully flawed representations of human traits. It also has quite a pleasing clutter to it, with the Gods co-habiting the universe with primordial giants and other miscellaneous early wisps of deities.

It’s Byatt’s treatment of the fable however that is most striking. Byatt relates the myth via the autobiographical ‘thin child’, whose experiences of wartime Britain are interspersed with her relation of the tale — a strategy that happily lends complexity to the work as a whole, whilst allowing Byatt to retain the essence of the original. In this Byatt is really in her element, with her expert control of voice having the adult, child and fable form a kind of Russian doll. The story of Ragnarok is told with the poetic tone of Sturluson as apprehended by the thin child, a feat that’s handled with remarkable virtuosity. Where the intrusions of the child’s voice into the myth are conspicuous and bold, with asides and misapprehensions, the voice of the adult is subtle and occasional. The restraint of the adult as contrasted with the starkness of the child shows enormous grasp of the differences in sensibility, and allows the myth to be read on different levels.

Conceptually also, the work is impressive. Understanding the role of mythology as abstraction, Byatt is happy to present Ragnarok as something ill defined and irregular. Acknowledging that it is fictive and drawn from many sources, adult and child both are able to accept a constant duality, where events can have both happened and not happened; names are changeable; characters can be the same and distinct; and myth can be both real and make-believe. The words tumble from the page with randomness and spontaneity, evocative of a sedimentary accumulation of human story, and Byatt’s descriptions are things of colour and shapelessness. This free and formless style is wonderfully appropriate to the mythology, which is itself so eclectic and untidy.

It’s funny that Byatt has decided to focus on the demise of the Gods, when Ragnarok is as much about creation as it is destruction. The liveliness of the prose is distinctly at odds with the title, and there is a naturalist’s glee in the lengthy lists of species that populate the book. But then I guess this is just another example of the duality present throughout. Austere scientific names of marine fauna, such as tunicates and polychaete worms, are contrasted with folksy common plant names, as adult and child are contrasted, and creation and destruction. Although in the afterword Byatt distances herself from having written sanctimonious parable, there is a distinct aspect of allegory about it, which relies on the contrast. It’s subtle though. Perhaps more an observation of human nature than a message. There’s almost a cynicism about it — in the way that there is both a lesson to be learned from the Gods and a lesson that can’t be learned. I guess she sees our own destruction as inevitable as that of the Gods.

Byatt herself sums it up best when the child ruminates on the loss of ‘the bright black world’ beyond the gate. All and nothing.