RaveThe Financial TimesCharlie and Eli are psychopaths as well as contract killers, young men who leave a gratuitous trail of violence in their wake. Their only bond is to one another, and this bond is fraying. Eli, the narrator, has discovered his conscience, and his doubts gradually change the relationship between the two men … The Sisters brothers have been contracted by their mysterious employer, the Commodore, to find Hermann Kermit Warm and do away with him. Warm’s name, along with his ridiculous invention, a liquid that makes the gold in the streams of California sparkle and separate out from other minerals, alerts us to the absurd premise of the novel. As we follow one violent, caricatured episode after another, we realise that The Sisters Brothers is ostensibly a witty noir version of Don Quixote … 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.
