The Sisters Brothers

Title: The Sisters Brothers
Author: Patrick deWitt
Publisher: Ecco

After 'Unforgiven,' I figured that was it for the Western as a genre. We'd built up this mythos around the gunslinger, The Man With No Name riding his Pale Horse around and dispensing justice, Wild Bunch style ... and the whole thing had been revealed to be complete, utter and total pile of buffalo turd. The gunslinger was a lawless, murderous drunk quite happy to gun down unarmed men at point-blank range. Justice was dispensed with.

Turns out I was wrong. There is another, fresh take on the Western, and it is provided by the 2011 oddball, black comedy novel 'The Sisters Brothers' (the movie version, starring John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal, will be released this month: see trailer above). We've gone from the 'good guy always wins' to the 'bad guy always wins', and now, with 'The Sisters Brothers,' to 'nobody wins, the whole thing's just a random, idiot series of accidents.'

The brothers of the title, Eli and Charlie Sisters, for example, are assassins but not anti-heroes: they're just two guys, making a living and trying not to think too hard about it. Their employer, known simply as the Commodore, tasks them with killing a chemist named Herman Kermit Warm and retrieving his mysterious 'formula.'

There follows a number of episodic, disjointed adventures which highlight the two men's deadpan approach to life in all its chaotic brutality, Charlie drinking and Eli ruminating his way through each episode.

One early sequence, for example, features the following sequence:

• Eli Sisters gets a toothache, 
• which leads them to a serial failure of a businessman trying to make a new living as a dentist (Charlie robs him of his anesthetic, giving the dentist one more failure to chalk up to his name), 
• which leads the woozy Eli to seek shelter in an old woman's cabin, only to become worried the woman is a witch who has cursed the doorway, 
• which leads to Charlie murdering several men to get an axe to break open the window so Eli can escape
• only for Eli to rush out the doorway anyway when he sees a bear attacking his horse. 

So what starts with a toothache ends in a robbery, multiple homicide and the destruction of an old woman's home. For no good reason other than: Just because. That's the way things are.

In a way, this last incarnation feels more real than Clint Eastwood's anti-Western, in that there's no sense of any moral order, even an inverted one. Stuff just happens-often darkly funny, amusing stuff-but random stuff nonetheless.I'd call it picaresque, but it's much less high-falutin' than that, and our not-quite heroes survive not because of their wits, but because they are more at home in chaos than those who seek to waylay them. 

The writing, by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, is an absolute breath of fresh air after my recent slog through some of SF&F's more tiresome prose. The book is narrated by Eli Sisters in a tone of quirky understatement, viewing a man gunned down in a duel with the same equanimity as the weather or his hungover brother. "I stood a long while before her looking glass, studying my profile, the line I cut in this world of men and ladies" captures something of the ponderous yet oddly charming verbiage.

In Eli's detachment and his brother's energy there's an almost Of Mice and Men feel to the brothers, with Eli as Lennie and Charlie as George, only twisted as with all things in this book, so the strong yet violent one is now shown to be the more capable of making his way in this world, and it's the smart one who stumbles. 

If you're willing to accept the haphazard, episodic nature of the plot, and willing to do a bit of work to see the humor when the book resolutely refuses to wink at you even at its most absurd, then this is a highly enjoyable read.