REVIEW: THE SISTERS BROTHERS AND HARVEST

TOM'S REVIEW 

For the first time in JFDI’s short but stimulating history the assignment called for two books: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt; and Harvest by Jim Crice.  It did not mark the first time for a dual assignment, as the previous one had called for Season One of the TV series “Breaking Bad” and as many essays by Bertrand Russell as a man could stomach.  But ask any schoolboy which is weightier: two books: or a TV show plus an optionally-sized collection. We all know the answer to that one.

Like schoolboys, some of us finished the assignment, some of us came close to finishing it and some of us went online to see if we could find the videos.  I admit to the advantage of having read the books before I picked them.  I loved one and admired the other and thought I could finesse a comparative lit assignment even when my initial reaction was they had little in common. 

But they do:

--Both were short-listed for Booker Prizes. 

--Both are about days of yore that are core to the images we contemporary folk have about the respective countries in which the novels are set: America during the California Gold Rush; and England before the arrival of the dark, satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. 

--Both are filled with the kind of violent cruelty that seems acceptable for the setting and abhorrent to us when we read it in the news. 

 On first reading, The Sisters Brothers was the more enjoyable, not only for me but also for 80% of JFDI. The story is about two bounty hunters, Charlie and Eli Sisters, whom their boss the Commodore has sent to kill a former employee the Commodore has accused of stealing.  Charlie is very lean and very mean, especially when he’s drunk a bottle of brandy, which he does often.  Eli, relative to most people in his profession, is burdened with a surfeit of weight, conscience and self-awareness.  He is the narrator.

Soon after I read Sisters, I sent a short critique to friends saying, “It’s the novel Quentin Tarrantino would write.” But it isn’t. It’s the novel the Cohn Brothers would write. Eli’s narration is filled with unintended humour and irony that is the trademark of Cohn characters.  Example: Eli tells Charlie he’s through with killing after this latest assignment; Charlie reminds him that after they finish with this assignment, they will have to kill the Commodore; and then they will have to kill the Commodore’s men who will want revenge; to which Eli says, “I mean I’m through with this era of killing.”

That is not to say that Sisters is only an exercise in offbeat humour like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski.  In the final chapters, it turns serious about themes like greed, fair play and the siren’s song of the outlaw’s life. That’s when the story deflates for me.  Whoever makes the movie version is going to have to juggle a Lebowski beginning with a No Country for Old Men ending.  Good luck with that one.

   

Harvest has no such juggling act. It starts somber and it ends somberer.  The initial JFDI sentiment was 4 to 1 in favour of Sisters. Only Alistair—The Quiet Beatle—stumped for Harvest.  The three Americans—Eric, Joe and I—thought Alistair’s POV said something about the difference between blind Yankee optimism and English resignation to the obviously inescapable outcome.  James, though, sided with the Yanks.  So then we had to tweak the theory by saying that Alistair is preternaturally British because he has Scottish roots and grew up in Cornwall while James works for Bank of America.

But the whole dynamic did say something about the 80-20 rule, which says that 80% of your customers are non-nutritive bulk while 20% are your quality, mate.  As Alistair stated his case for Harvest, the rest of us were sucked into an earnest discussion of the book’s core theme about the fragility of the social contract and how quickly it can unravel—in the case of Harvest, in less than a week, and that in an era we contemporary types like to think took its own sweet time. 

The basic plot of Harvest is that three outsiders come to a tight-knit village dependent on the largesse of a manor house which has been vandalized.  The three—an old man, a young man and a bewitching woman—are blamed for the vandalism and the two men are placed in stocks for seven days.  Being pilloried strikes us modern men as almost quaint, a source of fun at Ye Olde Renaissance Faires. Harvest shows that weeklong starvation in shackles is nothing less than the advanced form of interrogation of its day.  If we as a global community still need a lesson in how destructive torture can be to our collective soul, Harvest provides it.

The upshot is that Harvest spawned a much livelier discussion than The Sisters Brothers.  For the majority, it was less enjoyable but more thought-provoking--like 12 Years a Slave versus Argo.  And it also made the perfect transition to our next book, Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21^st Century, a non-fiction heads-up about the fragile social contract.  As some bright JFDI spark pointed out: “The three outsiders come to the village after being driven out of one transitioning from crop to sheep farming. The village they come to is about to experience the same.  Without knowing it, the villagers are looking at their own future.”

Just to keep things real, the meeting ended with the JFDI list of preferred stars of the female version of “The Expendables.” The main criterion was “former stars desperate for a paycheck.” Once again, Alistair nailed it: Sarah Ferguson.

It’s always the quiet ones.  

Four stars for both      

ERIC'S REVIEW

In life broadly speaking you have two options: you can go looking for trouble, or you can wait to have trouble come looking for you. The end of the voyage of discovery might mean going home; the consequence of staying put might mean your home going. Travelling, or unravelling. Your choice. In the old days the choice might mean you took work off the land you found; the alternative might be that the land you found yourself in worked you. Progress, either generated by exploring new worlds or transported into your own world by alien bearers of technology and greed might increase production or bring wealth but could bring destruction as well.

Two books, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, and Harvest, by Jim Crace, come at these questions from very different angles. The former is a story of two hired guns (the narrator Eli and his brother Charlie, last name Sisters thus the title) whose peripatetic life in search of their target (a killing ordered by the invisible Commodore) cuts a murderous swathe through the Wild West. The latter recounts a calamitous seven days in the life of a small bucolic village in England whose world is upended by visitors. The narrator, Walter Thirsk, is the only one it seems with a thirsk (sic) for life in a village paralysed by tradition. At the end of both, like the homecoming signalling the end of a journey or the harvest signalling the end of nature's circle of life, you are left with distant memories and empty fields. And not a lot else.

Just as someone said that America and England are two worlds separated by a common language, these books epitomise the different ethos and thoughts of the New World versus the Old. (One assumes they take place at more or less the same time). The two brothers are emblematic of manifest destiny (read aimless wandering) where society was mobile and one's place in it determined by aggression and the barrel of a gun. Wide open spaces. Murderous intentions. The rush after a glittering metal hiding stubbornly in the ground. Harvest's rural English village was ruled by feudal laws and the Lord of the Manor and was organised along strict lines of birth, law, and tradition. No one thought of leaving. To go where? To do what? England is after all an island, and a small one at that. They stayed until their choice was forced upon them by unwelcome visitors who exposed all of the prejudices and suppressed furies of a small village as they were quickly swallowed up by progress.

Without ruining either story, suffice it to say that the endings are somewhat anti-climactic and certainly  bleak. Like life at that time, one supposes. In both cases fire both literally and figuratively swallows up life's work.

The writing in the two books is markedly different; the easy flowing quickfire narrative of DeWitt and the dense and florid description of Crace where action happens at a glacial pace. Both are effective. There are glimpses of really fine writing in both, to wit: The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.(De Witt). Or: Their best riches are ignorance of wealth. Or: The man's a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat. (Crace).

De Witt's language is easily accessible and spare. Crace's book has more unknown words than a small thesaurus, and thus one learns perhaps a bit more about flora and fauna.

They were both shortlisted for the Booker. Neither won.

But that doesn't mean they weren't worth something, whether your psyche is one that likes to travel or stay at home.

3 stars for the lot of them.