Book Review: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Reviewed by George, Berkelouw Paddington

One of the better reviews I read about The Sisters Brothers (I think it was on the Guardian website) commented on the difficulty of making readers feel true empathy for the characters of a novel. And when your lead characters are two guns-for-hire - one a merciless psychopath, the other a tempered thinker - this task becomes ever more difficult. But in this unpredictable, rollicking Western, Patrick deWitt takes the reader all the way to the end to find out the fortunes Eli and Charlie Sisters.

We meet the two characters soon after they have been employed by the ominously named Commodore to track down a prospector, Hermann Kermit Warm. Already, this assignment is different from previous jobs - the Commodore has named Charlie as lead-man, making Eli wary of the relationship between Charlie and the Commodore and perhaps a little jealous at being told what to do.

While the novel bears the marks of a classic Western - chance encounters with strangers, casual violence (which does not occur often but is graphically described with no emotion), small towns, superstition, lust for women - it does so much more. Narrated from the view of Eli Sisters, he and Charlie are brothers only by name. Eli is thoughtful, always wary of avoiding confronting situations because he knows that Charlie is all too eager to reach for his pistol. He is also the most loyal and sentimental of the two, as shown by how he treats the horse that he never wanted. On the other hand, Charlie sees killing as the easiest solution to all of life's problems, can drink more than the average man, and has dreams of being as powerful as the Commodore. Yet make no mistake, Eli does not have a greater moral code than his brother - when his blood is up or his brother is in danger, he can be just as thoughtless and cruel. Nevertheless, deWitt still manages to elicit our empathy for the brothers in key moments in the novel.

A review for this book has been quite difficult to write because the plot is quite unpredictable and the surprises many, and I don't want to give too much away. What I enjoyed the most was that deWitt seems to love all his characters, even those that are tangents to the main plot line, with each having his or her own strange story that colours the landscape that the Sisters brothers travel through. To confirm this, David Wroblewski (author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) is quoted on the back of the book saying, "Honestly, I can't recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths."

As the first Booker Prize shortlisted novel that I have ever read, I was pleased to find that it was a very 'readable' novel yet maintains the characteristic qualities of a literary novel without beating you senseless with its quality. This book is an easy gift to give this Christmas and is for every reader.

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