The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers is a genre-bending western that was short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize. It didn't win. I can't say if this is just or not, as I haven't read any of the other books on the list, but this book was certainly worthy.I'll warn you there will be spoilers later on in this review. So, I'll pause here to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My one problem was a mild dissatisfaction with the ending or, rather, the events leading up to the ending. It is a minor problem, and something I can't quite articulate. Perhaps the answer will come to me while writing this review. I recommend the book. It is a noir western that contains some wickedly deadpan humor. I think it was a reviewer from the Los Angeles Times that said this would be the outcome if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.Set in the American west in 1851, the novel is about the notorious assassin brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters. They are hired guns for the mysterious Commodore, and their current assignment is to kill Hermann Kermit Warm because the Commodore claims he has stolen something that belongs to him.I found a vague similarity to Of Mice and Men - two brothers, one a simpleton, the other his protector - but, in this novel, it is the simple-minded brother who is the narrator. Little else about this book reminds me of the classic, but I wonder if the author didn't take a kernel of his idea from that book.The novel starts out with Eli Sisters, the narrator, contemplating horses, or his lack of an adequate one. No good western should be without horses, and this book is chocked full of them. But, unlike other westerns, this book doesn't treat them with gratuitous reverence.At one point, Eli's poor horse has his eye scooped out with a spoon because of infection. It seems gruesome - and it is - but it is made less so because Eli does it out of dedication to the animal. Or as much dedication as he's capable of.The story is Eli's inner journey. It's about the contradictions of life, where the dumb can sometimes be smart; how even the most simple-minded person can have something worthwhile to say, or can have an original idea; and that sometimes the protected becomes the protector - that roles change. We are not always just one thing.The Sisters Brothers is written with plainness and humor. The subtle humor can be seen in the following exchange between the brothers. When an opportunity comes along to trade in Eli's old horse for a better one, Charlie says:"You've had a tough time with Tub, I'll not deny it. A happy coincidence, this horse just walking up to meet you. What will you call him? What about, Son of Tub?"Most of the book is made up of the brothers' trek to meet up with Henry Morris, the front man who is to find Hermann Kermit Warm so the brothers can do their ill deed. Along the way, they meet many interesting and bewildering characters: a dentist who has failed at everything else and introduces Eli to the wonders of tooth power and brush; a distraught, crying man that they meet more than once; an abandoned hapless boy with another ill-fated horse; and a gypsy that may, or may not, have put a curse on the Eli.Along the way there is much killing, for a variety of reasons. After going into town to get help for a spider bite that Eli has received, Charlie summarizes the randomness, or providence of it all, as if there is no control over the killings: "...it is a spider to blame for the early demise of your group. A woolly, fat-bottomed spider in search of warmth - here is the cause of your deaths."The crux of the novel is that Eli is tired of the killing life. He has started to contemplate the moral question. This puts a drag, a tug, on the brothers' relationship and provides the dramatic tension.The brothers finally make it to San Francisco, where they are to meet Morris, but he's nowhere to be found. During their search, they meet a man walking down the road petting a chicken and strike up a conversation. The man goes on to say: "My feelings about San Francisco rise and fall with my moods. Or is it that the town alters my moods, thus informing my opinions? Either way, one day it is my true friend, a few days after, my bitterest enemy."The brief description of San Francisco during the gold rush makes me wonder if the influx of people during that frenzied time didn't leave an indelible mark on the city, and California in general. Here are Eli's thoughts:"Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and on I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented though strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it."Nothing is ever easy for the brothers, and so, when they go to the hotel to ask about Morris, the proprietress is loath to hand over the diary he unwittingly left behind. They resort to their usual methods of persuasion to garner the diary. It provides them with a clue to where they might find Warm and Morris, and to the Commodore's real motivations for having Warm killed.Here is where the spoiler comes in, so stop reading now if you haven't read the book yet. I don't give everything away, but enough to give you warning.Once they finally find the other pair, the story takes a twist. The brothers realize the Commodore lied to them. Warm didn't steal anything. In fact, it is the Commodore who wants to steal from Warm. Morris has already learned this and has turned his back on the Commodore to take up with Warm. But what are the brothers to do? They do what they generally do; let it play out and deal with things as they come.The Commodore is after Warm's secret chemical formula for a solution that promises to reveal gold hidden in the bottom of streams. The brothers decide against killing Warm and become partners with the two men. They will help cull the gold from the river in exchange for a share of what they find.The chemical solution works. They do find gold, but things go terribly wrong. And here is the point of my discontent. Charlie makes a critical error during the process. The mistake seems out of character. Although Charlie appears reckless at times, his action seems utterly thoughtless and without proper motivation. It is an action the author does not explain to my satisfaction.The reader could take this error as Charlie subconscious desire to get out of the business. Even with all the gold in the world, he'll never be free of the killing life, unless he rids himself of the one thing that makes him who he is: his gun hand. But the reader is not given enough insight into the motivations behind Charlie's careless action to come to this conclusion, and I believe this is the reason the ending seemed flat to me.While I find some of the brothers' behavior abhorrent, the author made me care about them. There was always humor to temper the morbidity and gruesomeness, and Eli's voice was delightful. The elements of magical realism sprinkled throughout add to the intrigue and poetry of the story.Even with the one minor criticism, I found The Sisters Brothers to be an excellent bit of writing and a delight to read.

Set against the historical backdrop of the California Gold Rush, Patrick DeWitt’s titular heroes are brothers Charlie and Eli Sisters, who are also assassins, on a mission to kill a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm. This combination of memorably comic names, historical setting, and tone described within the premise completely encapsulates all one would need to know about this beautifully bizarre novel. Additionally, however, and to even higher distinction, the novel’s picaresque structure is wrought with exceptional creativity that further distinguishes this work from its many contemporary genre peers and deserves very high praise.Narrated by Eli Sisters, the brothers serve as assassins for the Commodore—an authoritative figure that tasks the boys with jobs requiring more dangerous or fatalistic endings. The task at hand demands the brothers seek out and kill a one Hermann Kermit Warm—a prospector that has apparently stolen from the Commodore at the cost of his life. The novel is told with a picaresque structure of extremely short, yet memorable, narration of the brothers’ adventures and mishaps in their search for Warm across the Western landscape.Tonally, the novel strikes a very rare and impressive balance between hilariously sharp dialogue and darkly comic situations that slowly navigate toward scenes of heartbreaking tragedy and acute poignancy. The only real tonal parallel that one may suggest is something close to that of the filmic works of the Coen Brothers, though DeWitt’s original voice still separates itself from those exceptional storytellers. Moreover, the tone complements the pacing of this episodic narrative to very impressive results. The book is an undeniable page-turner without ever losing the depth of its characterization or sacrificing any of the various emotional levels at play.Though the book touches on a number of familiar Western genre staples—from assassins, to Mexican standoffs, to the larger themes of men imposing their morals upon others within a burgeoning civilization—the novel also successfully eschews many of these classical expectations to surprising and thought-provoking results. Despite the brothers’ job title of assassins, and the numerous violent acts that populate the narrative, the characters are imbued with a very touching and moving sense of pathos very unlike those found in the brutal landscapes occupied by traditional Western fiction. There are questions of moral ambiguity explored within this novel to incredibly successful results that bring to mind aspects of contemporary western writer S. Craig Zahler’s revelatory work (my favorite fiction writer: both A Congregation of Jackals and Wraiths of the Broken Land are masterpieces). Specifically, there are interludes wherein the protagonist confronts what may be the Devil/evil incarnate through the form of a little girl that remains one of the book’s most resonant and thought-provoking creations.The Western genre stands as one of the best prisms for an author’s exploration of those thematic aspects of their obsession in tandem with those central themes to the American narrative at large. Themes of masculinity, spirituality, luck, the cost of success at the sacrifice of a man’s morals—these are all ideas embedded within the myth of American man and which the Western genre often explores through its setting of a terrain caught between civilization and barbaric tribalism. As the best Westerns are capable, The Sisters Brothers offers a fascinating and praiseworthy peak into DeWitt’s version of these central tenets: allowing an new perspective on both those time-honored traditions of the genre and those specific literary realizations brought forth by his singular imagination.http://nickyarborough.com/book-review-the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt/

The Sisters Brothers is a truly original novel. While it’s a Western, it doesn’t completely feel like it. The writing style is so lyrical and the dialogue flows so effortlessly that it feels more of a satire, an interweaving of humour, brotherhood, intrigue and murder. The two Sisters brothers, Charlie and Eli are hitmen for the Commodore, who has contracted them to assassinate Hermann Kermit Warm. They are both remorseless in killing but Eli wants to try new things and dreams of a different life, perhaps opening a store, settle down with a female, any female - such a sweet guy. His volatile and less sensitive elder brother doesn’t have the same outlook. They are both psychopaths, with a lack of empathy or emotional attachment, and this makes for some witty and entertaining exchanges.There is nothing predictable about the storyline. While we know the main plot from the outset, it’s an interesting undulating route they navigate through the narration, either planned or unplanned.It was a joy to just lift this book and let the words flow off. The chapters are short and punchy, underpinning a good solid pace to the story. I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this book.

What I particularly loved about this book (I had to read it after seeing the excellent film) was how sympathetic the two murderous brothers are to the reader. They are travelling to California to carry out yet another murder at the behest of the mysterious and powerful Commodore, leaving a Shakespearean body count in their wake, bickering and blundering and casually reaching for their ever-ready guns.Their tale is told by Eli, the older brother, who is tortured by memories and his own self-reflection, and looking for love and a way out of his savage life. Charlie, the leader and more forceful personality, has his own demons, drink and the shadow of their ghastly childhood with a violent father.The madness of the Californian goldrush in 1851, the greed, filth, desperation, saloons, Indians, guns and horses aplenty, is all there, with astonishing tales of hardship, luck and reversals of fortune.The men the brothers are hunting to kill turn out to be something very unexpected, and the story twists shockingly and the brothers are left changed for ever.I'm unsurprised the book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this is both a book you won't want to put down, and a deep, many layered work of literature with layers of symbolism, thoughtful and significant pronouncements on life, man's relation to man and animals, morals, the nature of love and family.It's sad, funny, profound, wickedly irreverent, and always surprising.After seeing the film and reading the book I can't decide which is better. They are very very different, but both equally good in their own way.

On the surface this sounds like a Western, two hired killers hunt down their target in the Wild West. But it has a dreamlike quality, the younger brother narrates, never quite understanding the significance of what he is seeing.Initially I found the book engaging, midway through my attention began to wander, wondering whether it would actually amount to anything much. For me the ending helped make the book. Although odd, it seemed to flow from what had come before, and offered a sort of resolution that the beautifully described wanderings were calling out for. Worth a read if you are looking for something a bit unusual, but it won’t be to everyone’s taste.

I’m not sure what to make of The Sisters Brothers. Whilst I didn’t love it, I did find it oddly compelling. It’s a western but not in the traditional sense. At its core, it’s a story about brotherhood set against a violent backdrop. The brothers are hitmen and well suited to their profession. They aren’t pleasant or likeable but their strange relationship and peculiar exchanges make for entertaining reading. This book won’t be for everyone but I’m glad I gave it a chance and so should you.

Not what I thought it was going be! Two gunslingers, twins but exact opposite personalities, paid killers set out to find their mark. The plot, though a little gruesome at times, develops into a fascinating page turner and the characters are vivid and engaging. There is dark humour, deWitt writes simple but compelling,elegant prose. A story I shall remember for a long time, he is a gifted writer, I shall certainly read more of his books