Western – She Reads Novels

When I first heard about The Heart in Winter last year, despite seeing some very positive reviews I decided I wasn’t interested in reading it as it didn’t sound like my sort of book. After it was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize earlier this year, I wondered if I’d been too quick to dismiss it and as Kevin Barry is an Irish author, I decided to try reading it for Reading Ireland Month (hosted this month by Cathy of 746 Books).

When I started reading, it seemed that my fears about it were justified. It’s a western, set in 1890s Montana, with lots of drinking, lots of swearing and lots of sex. Worse, there are no quotation marks to indicate speech, something I always dislike and find distracting. Still, I was prepared to give it a chance and persevere…

Tom Rourke is an Irishman living in Butte, Montana, where he works as a photographer’s assistant and a writer of love letters for illiterate men hoping to find wives. He’s also a drunk and an opium addict, drifting through life with no real aim or direction. Everything changes for Tom when Polly Gillespie arrives in town. Polly is newly married to an older man, Anthony Harrington, the fanatically religious captain of a copper mine. She’s already having doubts about her marriage, so when she and Tom fall in love, they decide to run away together. Stealing a horse, they head out across Montana and Idaho, hoping to make it all the way to California, but Harrington won’t let his bride escape that easily and soon a posse of gunmen are in pursuit.

Once Tom and Polly left Butte and set out on their journey, I started to feel much more engaged with the story. Although their romance was very sudden (literally love at first sight, with no time to show how their relationship developed), I still found it convincing and could easily believe that these two flawed, lonely people would form an instant connection. The narrative is split between Tom and Polly on the run and Harrington’s men who are hunting them down and although it seems that the odds are against the young lovers, I still hoped things would work out for them and they would find the happiness they deserved.

I wish I could say I loved this book the way everyone else has, but that wouldn’t be true. However, I did find a lot of things to admire in it, particularly the way Barry’s use of language brought the setting so vividly to life. There are also some very colourful supporting characters, both in Butte and among the people Tom and Polly meet on their travels. As I mentioned earlier, though, I really hate the current trend for not using punctuation correctly. If the idea is to make the prose feel more immersive, it does the exact opposite for me. Apart from that, I think I’m just not a fan of westerns in general. I did enjoy Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, but the other westerns I’ve tried since then haven’t really worked for me, not even Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, whose work I usually love.

I won’t be at all surprised if this book is shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize next month or even if it turns out to be the eventual winner. I just wasn’t the right reader for it, but I’m still glad I tried it and got to know Tom and Polly.

Until I picked up The Sisters Brothers last month I had never read a western before and didn’t think I would ever want to read one. But after Patrick deWitt’s novel, with its unusual title and cover, appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist earlier this year and so many people were saying they enjoyed it, I thought I’d see what it was like.

The Sisters Brothers is set in the 1850s during the Gold Rush and has everything you would expect to find in a western – guns, horses, saloons, duels, drinking, fighting, and gold prospecting. I know this might not sound very appealing to a lot of you, but I hope you won’t let it put you off because at the heart of this novel is a wonderful story about the relationship between two brothers. They are Charlie and Eli Sisters, names that are feared throughout the wild west. Charlie and Eli are hired killers, who earn their living by taking orders from the mysterious Commodore. When the Commodore tells them that their next assignment is to find and kill the prospector Hermann Kermit Warm, the brothers set off on an eventful journey from Oregon to California.

The brothers encounter lots of memorable characters on their travels (including a ‘weeping man’, an orphaned boy and his horse, and a dentist who introduces Eli to the joys of the toothbrush) but the focus is always on Eli and Charlie themselves. Charlie is the more dominant and aggressive brother, while Eli is more cautious and sensitive, which causes some conflict between the two. I was pleased to find that both characters did develop and change, at least to some extent, over the course of the book. Charlie had seemed a completely unsympathetic character at first, but I later found that he had a bit more depth than I’d originally thought. And while Eli wasn’t exactly the most pleasant of people either, I couldn’t help liking him as he did at least have a conscience and wanted to be a better person – even if he didn’t always manage it.

The Sisters brothers are the type of characters we would more often read about from the opposite perspective, as the book’s villains – but in this book, with the story being narrated by Eli, we are supposed to accept them as our heroes (or anti-heroes, maybe). It’s a testament to Patrick deWitt’s writing that he makes it possible for us to care so much about a pair of murderers and I think this is due partly to Eli being such an appealing narrator. Some of the dialogue is very funny and there’s lots of dark humour, but I should probably warn you that there are also some fairly graphic scenes of violence and cruelty, though I think this is to be expected considering the setting and the profession of the two main characters.

The chapters are short and there’s always something happening: in the first fifty pages alone, Eli is bitten by a venomous spider, his horse gets attacked by a bear and a witch tries to put a curse on the brothers. It all felt slightly surreal and sometimes it was hard to see where the story was really leading but it was so much fun it didn’t matter. Later in the book, though, there were some passages that were quite sad and melancholy, which I thought gave the second half of the book a noticeably different feel to the first.

As you can probably tell by now, I loved this book, which I think proves that it doesn’t matter if something is described as a ‘western’, a ‘romance’, a ‘mystery’ or anything else: a good story is a good story and The Sisters Brothers was one of the best I’ve read this year.