Tag: Shadow Giller Prize 2011

Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, Granta, Patrick deWitt, Publisher, Setting, USA, Western

‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick deWitt

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The-Sisters-Brothers

Fiction – Kindle edition; Granta Books; 272 pages; 2011.

Canadian author Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and longlisted for this year’s Giller Prize.

It is the kind of book that could best be described as an enjoyable romp. It’s billed as a Western, but I saw it more as a road story — with guns and horses.

Set during the California gold rush of the 1850s, it is narrated by Eli Sister, one half of the Sisters brothers of the title, who makes his living as an assassin. But Eli is not your average killer for hire — he has a sensitive side, troubled by his weight, worried he’ll never find a woman to settle down with and constantly dreaming of a different life, perhaps running a trading post “just as long as everything was restful and easy and completely different from my present position in the world”.

His elder brother Charlie is more what one would imagine as a typical killer — he is ruthless, is attracted to violence and doesn’t suffer fools. But he’s also an alcoholic and his love of brandy means he spends a lot of his time on the road nursing horrendous hangovers.

At the beginning of the novel we learn that the pair have been hired by the Commodore — a mysterious man whom we never meet — to kill gold prospector Hermann Kermit Warm (now, that’s what I call a great character name!). The brothers are based in Oregon and Warm is supposedly in California, hence their journey on horseback to hunt down their prey. Neither of them know why they have been asked to kill Warm, but this is the least of their concerns: there is tension between them because Charlie has been hired as the “lead” and therefore will get a greater share of the fee. Eli is not pleased.

Part of the reason that the novel is so entertaining is the relationship between the two brothers. The banter and constant, often petty, arguments between them are quite hilarious, especially the way in which they wind each other up and try to push emotional buttons just to get a reaction.

‘What’s that? You’re not smiling, are you? We’re in a quarrel and you mustn’t under any circumstances smile.’ I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘you mustn’t smile when quarreling. It’s wrong, and I dare say you know it’s wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.’

While we only ever see things from Eli’s perspective, he is a genuinely likable character, with just a few (quite serious) flaws. But what makes him so empathetic is that he recognises these flaws — “When my temper is up everything goes black and narrow for me. […] I do not regret that the man is dead but wish I had kept better hold of my emotions. The loss of control does not frighten me so much as embarrass me” — and strives always to improve himself.

He loves his brother, but wishes he wasn’t so free and easy with the drink — and his gun.

At first, his rather stilted old-fashioned voice takes some getting used to — mainly because it is free from contractions (these only appear in reported speech) — but there’s a lovely rhythm to it which makes for a refreshing change.

My problem with the novel lies mainly with the story arc. The first half is essentially a series of set pieces strung together. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, because they demonstrate the brothers’ less obvious differences and their rivalries. This scene, in which Eli gives a woman he meets a generous tip, perfectly captures the contrast between them, but also the bond that they share:

She dropped the coin into her pocket. Peering down the hall in the direction Charlie had gone she asked, ‘I don’t suppose your brother’ll be leaving me a hundred.’ ‘No, I don’t suppose he will.’ ‘You got all the romantic blood, is that it?’ ‘Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.’

But the second half, in which the brothers find Warm and then set about the task for which they’ve been hired, falls a bit flat. It doesn’t all go according to plan — that would be far too obvious — but it does get a bit melancholic. This isn’t helped by Eli doing a little too much soul-searching —  “I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all” — and later admitting that, “Sometimes I feel a helplessness”.

If there is a moral to this story it might be this: that hired killers will get what’s coming to them, eventually.

For two more takes on this novel, courtesy of my fellow Shadow Giller jurors, please see KevinfromCanada’s review and The Mookse and the Gripes’ review.

Alexi Zentner, Author, Book review, Canada, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Vintage Digital

‘Touch’ by Alexi Zentner

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Touch

Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 272 pages; 2011.

Good old-fashioned storytelling lies at the heart of Touch by first-time author Alexi Zentner. Set in the icy wilderness of Canada in the early 20th century, the tale is ripe with adventure, hardship, tragedy, murder, romance — and dark fairy tales. Oh, and there’s a teensy bit of cannibalism, too.

Spanning several generations, cut and spliced into interwoven narratives that jump backwards and forwards in time, Touch is told in the first person by Stephen, a 40-year-old Anglican priest returning to the place of his birth, where he is to take over the local church from his step-father. Or, as Stephen puts it, “to live in the shadows of my father and my grandfather in a logging town that has been drained of young men headed off to fight in Europe for the second war of my lifetime”.

As it happens, Stephen’s elderly mother is on her death bed, and he sets to work writing her eulogy for her up-coming funeral. As he sifts through his memories, trying to find the right words to write, he recalls events — and stories — from his own life and the lives of his relatives.

Chief among these is the death of his father and his younger sister, Marie, when he was 11 years old. This tragedy had a marked impact on Stephen’s life, but the return of his grandfather, Jeannot, left just as much of an impression.

In fact, Jeannot is the patriarchal heart of this novel, the character whom everything ultimately revolves. It is the stories he has passed down, across the generations, that Stephen remembers, and, in turn, shares with us, the reader.

Legend has it that a teenage Jeannot — who “had quit his training for the Catholic priesthood, left the orphanage, and traveled across the whole of Rupert’s Land”  — founded the town of Sawgamet when his dog discovered a nugget of gold as they were passing through. This sparked a gold rush and the town quickly grew in size. But Jeannot was clever and knowing that the gold would eventually run out, he set up a lumber company that helped cement his fortune.

But life in this frontier town was dangerous:

Men I knew had been killed by falling trees, had bled to death when a dull ax bounced off a log and into their leg, had been crushed when logs rolled off carts, had drowned in the river during a float. Every year a man came back dead or maimed.

Nature, too, is ominous, and the breadth and scale of the landscape belittles its new human residents — and this scares them:

My chest started to pound with urgency. I was thinking of all of the things that might lurk — the dangers of the woods: bears and wolves — but I had not expected it to be something as innocuous as the mountains that always loomed above.

And if it is not the mountains or the never-ending wall of trees, the woods are also populated with dangerous creatures. In Australia, we contend with snakes and spiders and the mythological bunyip, but in the Canadian wilderness there are bears and more — the wehtiko (“a man turned into a monster as a punishment for cannibalism”), the ijirait (also known as shape-shifters), the loup-garou (werewolf), the mahaha (a demon, from Inuit mythology), the adlet (a blood-drinking monster, also from Inuit mythology) and the qallupilluit (also known as a sea witch).

It is testament to Zentner’s writing ability that he makes these creatures seem wholly believable. I had a heart-hammering moment when Stephen recalls an incident from his childhood in which he encounters a qallupilluit:

I looked up to see the creature — I could not tell if it was a man or a woman — standing above me, its scaly skin fish-pale and bumped, mottled like it had been submerged under the water for a very long time. It had a large pouch on its back and stringy hair, and despite its milk-white eyes, the creature stared directly at me. The creature took a step toward me with unmistakable menace; it grabbed my wrist and dove into the water, pulling me after it.

The ferocious weather is a central — and dangerous — character in this novel, too. There’s a 30-foot snow storm in which Sawgamet’s residents are cut off from civilisation for one long, unbearable winter. But there is beauty in the weather, too, as this poignant paragraph demonstrates:

There is something about clear nights in the winter, the perfection of snow and ice in the light from the stars and the moon that always reminds me of the existence of God. When it’s cold enough, the sky seems to empty, and there is an infinite darkness, a sense that there is something unreachable and never-ending, something past the idea of heaven.

As you would expect from a novel narrated by a priest, there is a (slight) religious element to the story. Stephen has been damaged by events, not just the loss of family members, but of his unspoken time “behind the lines as a chaplain when we took Vimy Ridge and held Hill 70” during the Great War. Despite this, he claims that “my whole life is, in some ways, about faith”. Indeed, it is the stories of his family’s history and of the town’s history that he takes on faith — he doesn’t question their validity, although he is aware that there are gaps in his knowledge “that I cannot fill with anything other than speculation”.

In part, Touch is about loss — loss of family, loss of property, loss of life — but mostly it is about how we separate myth from reality, fact from fiction, experience from logic, and faith from doubt. How do we unravel the stories from the past in order to understand the stories we are writing for the future?

And while the supernatural elements in the text occasionally troubled me — there’s a touch of magic realism at work here, and I’m not much of a fan of that genre — I loved the fairy tale element. There is an especially compelling story about a golden caribou (depicted on the cover of the UK edition) that will stay with me forever.

On the whole, I have to say I loved this book. It is a gorgeously absorbing novel, perfect to curl up with in your favourite reading place.

Touch has been longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize. For another take on this novel please see KevinfromCanada’s review.