Last December I read Patrick de Witt's The Sisters Brothers, a black comedy set in the American West, which was short listed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. I did not review it for LitNet at the time, which puts me in the odd position of commenting now on a novel whose less vivid details have surely faded from mind. No matter. The Sisters Brothers is an over the top affair with vividness enough to work with.
I put de Witt's book into a category with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Sleeping Giant, although at face value they have little in common besides being road stories. I lump them together because both began strongly but became so derailed by their middle third that I considered not finishing them (something I almost never do). Whereupon they ended so strongly that the entire work was redeemed and I was left shamefaced at my doubt. No other novels have given me such whiplash as a critical reader.
The Sisters Brothers is not especially tightly written. Loose ends are left to flutter, but one does not mind much. Road stories will be road stories. What holds the reader is the appallingly likable voice of Eli Sisters, a gunslinger and hired assassin who, with his smarter but meaner brother Charlie, is known and feared through a cruel and peculiar little world. The Sisters do jobs for a shadowy mugwump of respectable society known as the Commodore. They are immune from their boss' motives. Charlie may or may not have a high regard for their career, but Eli could clearly care less. As he knows, really, he is being used by his brother, who in turn is being used by the Commodore. Killing is a job for him though not a very nice one. It's just more or less the best he can do. A constant metaphor for Eli Sisters is his hapless and woebegone horse, Tub (who of course he is using--however reluctantly). Says Eli:
"I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life."
The Sisters Brothers is a violent novel. De Witt never excuses or romanticizes violence, but those who are bothered by descriptions of cruelty know who they are and should read something else. It is also a darkly humorous novel that abounds with deadpan lines like: "It is impolite to speak of other people's clothing like that." A running joke is afforded by the new technology (new for 1851 Oregon) of toothbrushing. In one hilarious vignette, Eli introduces a pretty hotel clerk who has caught his fancy to the new practice. They spend a stolen afternoon basking in oral stimulation, after which Eli rather pathetically comes to think of her as his girl. Unbeknownst to him, his Dulcinea is a fledgling prostitute and far more interested in the money she can get off of his brother Charlie. Sad life, sad life.
Charlie and Eli are being funded by the Commodore to ride from Oregon Territory to San Francisco to murder a man they do not know and steal a formula in his possession. As a novel, The Sisters Brothers rides high as long as it stays on the trail--that is, as long as it remembers it is a road story. Once the brothers reach San Francisco, though, all that falls apart.
The middle third of this novel is badly done. It has the feeling of a separate story that has been grafted--none too naturally--onto the far better tale of the Sisters. Worse, an element of fantasy is introduced--glaringly ill fitted to the gritty (if occasionally zany) realism of the first third. The formula the brothers are required to steal holds a secret that causes gold nuggets to glow beneath stream bottoms, allowing prospectors to retrieve them without much fuss. Right. Worst of all, the tone of darkly comedic pessimism that made the first part worth reading has been jarringly replaced with a didactic kind of optimism: if only humankind would heed the ways of science, it preaches, our miseries would be few. The problem is no longer one of human nature, but one of certain people who don't get it.
What is going on here? De Witt is a youngish writer and I suspect he has fallen victim to a generational naïveté. Yes, science is heroic. And once the hydrogen bomb is produced, the successors of the Commodore will do what they can to sell it to Kim Jong-un. That is because of what people are--not because of what science is. De Witt seems simply to have forgotten that he was writing a book about people.
Fortunately for the reader, the final third of the book is even better than the first, to which it provides a kind of sequel--the Sisters Brothers ride again. The violence is stepped up, but so is the character development. As Eli rises the the fore, we realize that it has always been his story (the middle third be damned). And for all its ending's bloodshed, The Sister's Brothers has a more moving resolution than I presumed de Witt had in him.
I recommend the The Sisters Brothers with the reservations mentioned above. Who knows, some may even like the middle third of the book. The Man Booker Committee seems to have done so. Sad life, sad life.
