Y’all know I love my Brontës and I get so annoyed when either adaptations of their work or stories based on their lives get EVERYTHING WRONG, DAMMIT. My Brother’s Keeper is an eerie story involving the Brontë family, werewolves, and warring cults, and, darn it, it gets everything just absolutely perfect. I was so impressed with this book even though the whole warring cults thing was the least interesting thing about it.
I’m copying the plot from the publisher’s description:
When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.
But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.
In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.
When I was a kid I was heavily struck by a Michael Hauge quote (he’s a fantasy artist) in which he essentially said that the more outlandish the the things he wanted to represent, the more convincingly realistic the mundane details must be – trees and rocks and so forth have to look real if the viewer is supposed to believe in the unicorn standing amongst them. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but I was reminded of this as the plot became increasingly mystical.
The story works because, first of all, the mundane details feel correct. Things that ought to be heavy do, in fact, cause the characters difficulty when they try to lift them. People have to eat and drink and sleep. Much mention is made of potatoes, either eating them or peeling them or cutting them up. Struggles are as much mundane as mystical. For instance, the characters make frequent references to their efforts to convince local government to move the town’s well uphill from the cemetery – a real-life problem for the residents of Hayworth, the village where the Brontës lived, was that the cemetery drained directly into their drinking water.
Secondly, the story works because, to me, the portrait of the Brontës, specifically Patrick, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, their housekeeper Tabitha and Emily’s dog Keeper, is spot on. Everything they do and everything they say is perfectly in character. As bizarre as the plot is, it actually makes aspects of the Brontës’ lives make more sense rather than less. Dog fans will be especially thrilled that Keeper has a large role in the story. He is a Very Good Dog. For those that need to know how animals fare:
Does the dog die?
The dog does not die. However, eventually Emily dies just as she did in real life, and Keeper is very sad about it which made me weepy. So there’s that.
This is not a romance. Emily and Curzon clearly have a thing for each other, but circumstances (and history, which is why this is not a spoiler) prevent a HEA. However, the very tenuousness of their relationship, one which moves from animosity to friendship to “some unspoken thing”* makes it all the more moving. It’s a whisper of lost possibility that aches the heart.
The plot is fine. Lots of things happen. The wind wuthers about the moors, and there are ghosts and werewolves and Goddesses and terrible people and other dramatic things. It all holds together well, it’s tightly and beautifully written, it’s exciting and often scary, and it comes to a satisfying resolution.
However, the lasting impression I got from this book was one of tough women living in a tough place under tough conditions and making art and meals consisting largely of potatoes and sometimes mutton, while also caring for the people among them. Also a general spookiness, and an impression of flawed humans and animals alike trying very hard to do good things. A must read for Brontë fans, horror fans, folklore fans, and anyone who likes strongly atmospheric and character-based writing in general.
*Confession: I stole this useful phrase from Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
