Another longshot on the Booker shortlist, Patrick deWitt's epic fable of two brothers' trip across the Wild West of the 1850s might be a far cry in subject matter from his debut novel Ablutions but it is just as "sharp and bitter and funny". It had reviewers likening him to an eclectic bunch of literary greats and their masterpieces; from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, not forgetting directing duo, the Coen brothers and their canon. Oregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters, notorious professional killers, are on their way to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. On the way, the brothers have a series of unsettling and violent experiences in the Darwinian landscape of Gold Rush America. Charlie makes money and kills anyone who stands in his way; Eli doubts his vocation and falls in love. And they bicker a lot. Weird, unsettling and darkly comic, just when are they going to make it into a film? Find out more at Lovereading.co.uk The Omnivore has rounded up all the press reviews for The Sisters Brothers to bring you a handy critical digest: .
... ostensibly a witty noir version of Don Quixote ... DeWitt's story is hugely entertaining. There are a few stylistic slips where modernity intrudes but on the whole deWitt keeps the period feel with great skill. The Sisters Brothers is not really an adventure story or a historical novel, however. It is a blackly comic fable about the usual wild west themes: emptiness, loneliness and the hollow lure of gold. Stella Tillyard
A reader looking for meticulous depiction of Oregon and California in 1851, however, will have to look elsewhere. Eli barely gives the landscape a glance, and people met along the way are simple figures in his moral drama. Nor does Eli have any larger philosophical or sociohistorical insights to offer. His narrative style is flat and literal, which is perhaps supposed to be the hilarious part. Jane Smiley
[An] unsettling, compelling and deeply strange picaresque novel ... for all its wry playfulness, The Sisters Brothers is no comedy. The travails of the humane yet morally ambiguous protagonist in a hostile, lawless and unpredictable universe have echoes of Cormac McCarthy's speculative classic The Road. Jake Wallis Simons
The atmosphere of cockneyed logic and freakish incident in this novel is reminiscent of the work of another pair of brothers - the Coens ... The Sisters Brothers shares with O Brother, Where Art Thou? an episodic framework and borrowings from the Odyssey ... Given the book's scepticism about the comforts of storytelling, its dewy-eyed final pages seem to glib; but for the most part, The Sisters Brothers is well worth the ride. Jonathan Beckman
Nothing in Patrick deWitt's first novel, Ablutions, a laconic barfly's lament for a dysfunctional life, could prepare you for his second, a triumphantly dark, comic anti-western; apart, that is, from the same devastating sense of confidence and glittering prose ... The writing is superb, with each brief chapter a separate tale in itself, relayed in Eli's aphoristic fashion. The scope is both cinematic and schematic, with a swaggering, poetic feel reminiscent of a Bob Dylan lyric, while the author retains gleefully taut control of the overall structure. Catherine Taylor
The bluff way with bloodshed may repel some, but this is a strong work, with tight prose in which not one syllable seems out of place. Anthony Cummins
Often blackly hilarious, this would make a tremendous film. Kate Saunders
... it is as funny as Ablutions, but has a much stronger narrative line, deeper characters and a vision of searing originality ... deWitt's great achievement [is] to match a narrator of such simple humanity to a tale of such lurid brutality. Edmund Gordon
Find out more at Lovereading.co.uk ________________________________________________________________________ Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of intelligent opinion.