Book review: 'The Sisters Brothers'

Book: The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
Granta
328 pages
Rs499

You may have come across this particular kind of siblings who can rarely see eye to eye on most issues, are perennially at each other’s throats, but still have an unseen yet fierce bond. And god save anyone foolish enough to rub either of them the wrong way.

They will come down on you like they were the Deol brothers and you abused their mother. Because Hell hath no fury as siblings scorned.

Charlie and Eli Sisters (yes, that’s where the quirky title of this eminently readable book comes from) are exactly that kind of siblings. In this story set during the 1850s’ American Gold Rush, the Sisters brothers are guns for hire working for a man only known as the Commodore. They are sent to chase down and kill a gold prospector, Hermann Kermit Warm, while retrieving his secret formula to extract gold.

Written from the point of view of the narrator, Eli, the overweight, genial and likeable brother, the book narrates their ‘road trip’, which can’t be better described than how Eli himself puts it: “You will often see this scenario in serialised adventure novels: Two grisly riders before the fire telling their bawdy stories and singing harrowing songs of death and lace.” Briefly, Eli is the kind who falls in love with every woman he meets; Charlie the exact opposite — the kind that will sleep with anything that moves. Eli is slow on the uptake and a reluctant killer, but capable of unimaginable savagery when he loses it; Charlie the clinical ‘when you shoot, shoot, don’t talk’ kind. Eli is the thinker and the softie; Charlie the hardboiled leader. In the end, however, the relationship between the brothers changes with respect to each other, with Charlie becoming more like Eli, or at least capable of empathising with his ‘loser’ brother.

Though on the surface the book has humour aplenty and is breezy, it is not for the faint-hearted. There is a lot of graphic but casually depicted Tarantino-like violence strewn all over. There is one especially chillingly scene in the first third that leaves you with no doubt that the narrator, for all his easy charm and wisdom, is not very different from his bloodthirsty psychopath brother.

Once these brothers get closer to their mark, things start changing. The final third, where the brothers start working for the prospector, could very well have been from another book. The dynamics between the brothers take a back seat as they play second fiddle to the prospector, who has his own back story. And slowly it emerges that the hit men, their spotter, Henry Morris (a well-written character hemmed in by a narrative that doesn’t really lend itself to digressions), and the quarry have much in common.

The prose reminds you of the best of Cormac McCarthy, and the narrative and the humour is of the Coen brothers kind. (It is that kind of a book… very original, but reminiscent of the works of various greats.) But never does it fail to hold the reader’s attention.
Does it deserve a Booker? Maybe, maybe not. In all probability, one of the other short-listed books will breast the tape ahead of it.

But what The Sisters Brothers definitely is, is great movie material (the front cover is more movie poster than book cover, the design elements inside the book are done with great attention to detail, and it even has two intermissions). Indeed, what struck me the most was how throughout its engrossing 300-odd pages, it never read like a book-book. The scenes, the settings, the narrative, the dialogue — everything read like a movie script. It really is one of those books begging to be made into a movie. And if it does end up in the right hands, its film adaptation may go on to win an Oscar.