One of the great things about hanging around Dr. Ben Yalow is that you come away with a giant list of things to read. Another is that you’ll learn more about how a man should dress well than in a year of reading fashion articles in GQ or The Planned Man, but this isn’t a fashion article. I’ll write more about suspenders and pocket squares another time.
When I told Dr. Yalow my favorite writer is Tim Powers, he lit up and asked me if I’d read Powers’s latest, My Brother’s Keeper. I told him I had not, but that I’d received it for Christmas and had it on my nightstand for when I got home.
“Read it now,” he said. “It’s the only thing I gave a five-star rating all last year.”
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t need anyone to recommend a new Powers book to me, but coming from Ben Yalow, I took it as immediate marching orders.
My Brother’s Keeper is like other works by Powers, whose specialty is taking gaps in the known whereabouts of historical figures and imagining a supernatural adventure for them to fill in those gaps. Powers is fantastic at science fiction, or the more common type of fantasies not featuring well-known personalities from history, but he really excels at this.
The Stress of Her Regard has a made-up protagonist, but through his eyes, we see the supernatural and horrifying influence that dark powers wielded in the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. On Stranger Tides is about undead pirates and shows us real movers and shakers from the golden age of piracy, like Blackbeard. (Sound familiar? Disney bought the rights, stripped out all characters and fun stuff, jammed Johnny Depp into it, and turned it into Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Trust me, the book is light-years better than that abomination of a movie.)
My favorite book of Powers’s—and possibly of all time—is Declare, which imagines that World War II, and the Cold War that followed, was a cosmic proxy fight between God and the forces of darkness, and heavily features real-life traitor Kim Philby and other titans of the espionage world.
Powers’s last few books were great, but Keeper is a return to this earlier style. The Brontë family, that clan of legendary literary heavy-hitters, is minding its own business in early-1800s England. It has suffered some truly anguishing losses—the mother and two of the children have died—but Patrick, the patriarch, and the remaining children are living in the church parsonage of a small town in England. Patrick is a minister. His son Branwell is a writer and painter. His surviving daughters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, are writers, as well.
My Brother’s Keeper opens with Branwell leading two of his sisters to a “fairy cave,” a supposedly haunted site on the gorse-choked moors of England. He has been visited by one of their dead sisters in a dream, he explains, and needs them to prick their fingers and smear their blood upon the wall of the cave. This will allow their sister to be resurrected. Or maybe just to visit them for a short time? It’s not clear, but he is very insistent. They give in, more to humor their brother than out of real belief in this absurdity, and this seals their fate.
In a phrase the book comes back to again and again, they have just signed a “promissory note” to a demon. The payment is their souls. They now owe their immortality and their salvation to a cult devoted to a god they didn’t even believe real.
What follows is a tale of forsaken gods, magical portals, ghosts and possessions, and an ancient secret society of damned creatures. Two warring sects of these creatures, actually—again, mirroring the fallen angels and divine attention on either side of the Great Game in Declare. Both sides want the blood and the souls of the Brontë family.
To tell much more would be to spoil events which happen even in the first few dozen pages of the book. Suffice it to say that if you are like me, a fan of Powers’s earlier books about the “lost years” of famous literary and historical figures, then you’ll heartily enjoy My Brother’s Keeper.
I was struck at times by the similarities of the Brontës to the Tenenbaums of The Royal Tenenbaums, the Wes Anderson sophomore effort (and possibly his best). A parent left alone to raise a passel of precocious, headstrong genius children. Death as a constant background element, so strong that it is almost its own character. The in-jokes and familial pidgin common among insular, close-knit groups of smarter-than-average siblings.
And, of course, the recurring theme of dogs.
I was also struck with an almost physical hurt as I kept reflecting, with each new chapter or section, on the knowledge that almost all these people are living on borrowed time. Even if Emily wins, even if Branwell wins, even if one helps the other to a victory they didn’t want…they’re all going to be dead in just a short year or two. Even Charlotte, the sister who helps but largely keeps out of the spiritual fray, because she did not sign that “promissory note,” will not last much longer.
Knowing the fate that befalls the characters in real life is part of the charm of a Powers book. We know what happened to Shelley, and to Byron. We know what happened to Blackbeard and Rackham (and we may endlessly debate the fate of Anne Bonney). We know the sad, grim fate of the traitor Philby, lionized by an insane gulag state and unable to ever return home, even after he realized the immensity of his miscalculation, and buried in a Moscow cemetery.
We also know what happened to Patrick Brontë. He was destined, or doomed, to outlive not only his wife, but every single one of his children, all of whom died childless. The hero of My Brother’s Keeper is Emily. The real tragic figure is her father, Patrick.
In the director’s extended cut of Lord of the Rings, which maybe doubles the runtime due to all the added footage, we see the king of Rohan mourning his only son. Theoden tells Gandalf, “No parent should have to bury their child.”
What utter sorrow. Knowing what’s coming for Patrick Brontë—in our own reality, and in the reality of My Brother’s Keeper—we wouldn’t trade places with him for anything. Not anything in this world, nor in any other.
Before this conclusion, however, we are treated to a haunting series of clashes between ancient powers perceived through the eyes of the Brontë family. The action is well-drawn and breath-catching. The mysteries feel appropriately dreadful and thoughtful. The characters, even the evil ones, are engaging and able to fail or be redeemed believably.
My one wish for My Brother’s Keeper is that it had been a hundred pages longer. I wanted to know more about the history of the adversary cult and its leaders, and to see flashbacks or recollections of previous family failures leading to the crisis. I suppose that leaving us wanting more is better than making us wish we had stopped one helping sooner.
Nick,
The original Intern Steve
Tim Powers has been my favorite author since I first read The Anubis Gates in high school.
I’m on a Powers and Blaylock binge right now. Love those guys. Excited to read this new one. “The Stress of Her Regard” is amazing. Power’s “connect the dots” approach to historical fiction is some of the best writing advice I’ve ever been given.