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.