Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are bad men; hired killers. They have seen and delivered “Quick death, slow death. Early death, late death. Brave death, Cowardly death.” Their patron, a powerful man known as the Commodore, has put the brothers on the trail of one Hermann Kermit Warm. Warm is “small in stature…” and “not above biting.” The accused thief has fled to California where he works a prospecting claim. Most jobs the brothers have worked as equal partners, but this time the Commodore has set Charlie up as Lead Man. The Commodore doesn’t like Eli, who asks too many questions—questions about “All these men foolish enough to steal from the Commodore? As feared a man as he is?”
The first section of the novel, “The Trouble with Horses” could just as easily be called The Trouble with Brothers. The reader senses a lifetime of history lurking beneath each brother’s every word and look. “Charlie poured me a drink, when normally we pour our own, so I was prepared for bad news.” Charlie, “too lazy to be good,” and often brandy-sick or addled by morphine, still manages to keep Eli’s loyalty. In the moments leading up to a gun battle, Eli describes his brother: “clear minded and without a trace of fear. He had always been this way, and though I had seen it many times, every time I did I felt an admiration for him.” And though they bicker and argue, taunt and tease, when guns are drawn the Sisters Brothers stand together. If one of the brothers is challenged (usually Charlie), the other will count off, and the duellists will fire on three. Of course, like all dirty-dealing gunmen, the Sisters Brothers (both of them, despite who was challenged) always fire on one. A trick Eli refers to as “an immaculate bit of killing.”
“I am not any one thing,” Eli says of himself. His kindness towards women and yearning for a simple, peaceful life are sharply contrasted with his blazing temper—especially if Charlie is in danger. After Charlie kills a prospector who’d been threatening them both, Eli remarks: “I wished the prospector might come back to life so I could kill him myself, but slowly.” Not satisfied, Eli brutally caves in the dead man’s head with his boot; it is not the killing or death that Eli regrets, but “the loss of control,” which embarrasses him.
Author Patrick deWitt shows the west in every grimy, violent cuss-laden detail: spider-filled boots, tooth rot, as well as western standards like gambling, double-dealing, superstitions and duels. However, the best westerns are not the sum of their gunfights, but the pauses between them, and the Sisters Brothers is no exception.
The Sisters Brothers has a cadence and flow to its prose and the reader can almost hear Eli’s laconic narration as the pages turn. Seemingly banal descriptions work perfectly for the understated western. “The life hopped out of him and he died.” Even old bread “tangy with the threat of mold” takes on a sort of antagonism. While the prose may appear simple if each sentence is taken on its own, DeWitt welds them together with an honesty of verse that is compelling, almost poetic. Eli thinks while Charlie goes to a saloon that “The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.” Peppered throughout like a spray of buckshot, are also examples of Eli’s wit, dry as the dusty expanse of the old west. “You can see she wants us to enter,” said Charlie, of a strange old woman offering the brothers succour. “Yes,” Eli thought, “past her lips and into her stomach.”
In San Francisco, the brothers find the man the Commodore sent to follow Warm has had a change of heart. His journal claims he was “born anew” in Warm’s “River of Light.” Warm was not a thief but a scientist. He has found a chemical method—“a diviner”—to find gold with greater ease than panning the rivers. It was failing to share the formula with the Commodore that earned Warm his death mark, not thievery. The brothers are hesitant to further empower the formidable Commodore with greater wealth—especially as Charlie has thoughts of supplanting him. And so allying with Warm, Eli and Charlie also are reborn. While pouring the chemical into the river, Charlie in his haste, splashes his gun hand. The wound, “blisters rising and falling, as though they were breathing, the way a bullfrog takes air into its throat” causes Charlie to lose the hand. To Eli it was “the beginning of our new brotherhood, with Charlie never again to be the one so far ahead, and me following clumsily behind.” Their roles were not “reversed, but destroyed.”
It is notable, perhaps, that DeWitt dedicates this tale to his own mother. When the bullets are spent, when the money is gone, and the Commodore is dead, it is to their estranged mother that the Sisters Brothers return—a beautiful and unexpected turn. Likewise beautiful is everything about the physical book itself. From its striking cover to DeWitt’s haunted author photo; its eminently readable type design, to it actually including “Intermissions”. In the days of cutthroat-priced ebooks, here is a hardcover that practically holds a Colt to your head and growls: read me.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick deWitt
Book Reviews
Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are bad men; hired killers. They have seen and delivered “Quick death, slow death. Early death, late death. Brave death, Cowardly death.” Their patron, a powerful man known as the Commodore, has put the brothers on the trail of one Hermann Kermit Warm. Warm is “small in stature…” and “not above biting.” The accused thief has fled to California where he works a prospecting claim. Most jobs the brothers have worked as equal partners, but this time the Commodore has set Charlie up as Lead Man. The Commodore doesn’t like Eli, who asks too many questions—questions about “All these men foolish enough to steal from the Commodore? As feared a man as he is?”
The first section of the novel, “The Trouble with Horses” could just as easily be called The Trouble with Brothers. The reader senses a lifetime of history lurking beneath each brother’s every word and look. “Charlie poured me a drink, when normally we pour our own, so I was prepared for bad news.” Charlie, “too lazy to be good,” and often brandy-sick or addled by morphine, still manages to keep Eli’s loyalty. In the moments leading up to a gun battle, Eli describes his brother: “clear minded and without a trace of fear. He had always been this way, and though I had seen it many times, every time I did I felt an admiration for him.” And though they bicker and argue, taunt and tease, when guns are drawn the Sisters Brothers stand together. If one of the brothers is challenged (usually Charlie), the other will count off, and the duellists will fire on three. Of course, like all dirty-dealing gunmen, the Sisters Brothers (both of them, despite who was challenged) always fire on one. A trick Eli refers to as “an immaculate bit of killing.”
“I am not any one thing,” Eli says of himself. His kindness towards women and yearning for a simple, peaceful life are sharply contrasted with his blazing temper—especially if Charlie is in danger. After Charlie kills a prospector who’d been threatening them both, Eli remarks: “I wished the prospector might come back to life so I could kill him myself, but slowly.” Not satisfied, Eli brutally caves in the dead man’s head with his boot; it is not the killing or death that Eli regrets, but “the loss of control,” which embarrasses him.
Author Patrick deWitt shows the west in every grimy, violent cuss-laden detail: spider-filled boots, tooth rot, as well as western standards like gambling, double-dealing, superstitions and duels. However, the best westerns are not the sum of their gunfights, but the pauses between them, and the Sisters Brothers is no exception.
The Sisters Brothers has a cadence and flow to its prose and the reader can almost hear Eli’s laconic narration as the pages turn. Seemingly banal descriptions work perfectly for the understated western. “The life hopped out of him and he died.” Even old bread “tangy with the threat of mold” takes on a sort of antagonism. While the prose may appear simple if each sentence is taken on its own, DeWitt welds them together with an honesty of verse that is compelling, almost poetic. Eli thinks while Charlie goes to a saloon that “The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.” Peppered throughout like a spray of buckshot, are also examples of Eli’s wit, dry as the dusty expanse of the old west. “You can see she wants us to enter,” said Charlie, of a strange old woman offering the brothers succour. “Yes,” Eli thought, “past her lips and into her stomach.”
In San Francisco, the brothers find the man the Commodore sent to follow Warm has had a change of heart. His journal claims he was “born anew” in Warm’s “River of Light.” Warm was not a thief but a scientist. He has found a chemical method—“a diviner”—to find gold with greater ease than panning the rivers. It was failing to share the formula with the Commodore that earned Warm his death mark, not thievery. The brothers are hesitant to further empower the formidable Commodore with greater wealth—especially as Charlie has thoughts of supplanting him. And so allying with Warm, Eli and Charlie also are reborn. While pouring the chemical into the river, Charlie in his haste, splashes his gun hand. The wound, “blisters rising and falling, as though they were breathing, the way a bullfrog takes air into its throat” causes Charlie to lose the hand. To Eli it was “the beginning of our new brotherhood, with Charlie never again to be the one so far ahead, and me following clumsily behind.” Their roles were not “reversed, but destroyed.”
It is notable, perhaps, that DeWitt dedicates this tale to his own mother. When the bullets are spent, when the money is gone, and the Commodore is dead, it is to their estranged mother that the Sisters Brothers return—a beautiful and unexpected turn. Likewise beautiful is everything about the physical book itself. From its striking cover to DeWitt’s haunted author photo; its eminently readable type design, to it actually including “Intermissions”. In the days of cutthroat-priced ebooks, here is a hardcover that practically holds a Colt to your head and growls: read me.
Anansi | 336 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0887842894