FictionReviewThe Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers was a hard act to follow, but DeWitt’s riff on the folk tale transports the reader to a gothic Europe drawn with relish and bravado
One of the great joys of comic fiction is that it can do anything it wants. It can explore the sexual possibilities of a giant salami, provoke empathy with a merciless killer, or throw the English language into a blender and make it taste like high gastronomy despite the weird colour and the lumps – or perhaps because of them. A male hero can, as here in Undermajordomo Minor, have a girl’s name.
The secret is nerve.
The Canadian writer Patrick deWitt has nerve. In the much-loved Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers, he memorably reinvented the western in a poignant comic drama of greed, grit and ruthlessness starring a pair of contract killers. In Undermajordomo Minor, his rickety, occasionally shambolic but engaging new flight of fancy, he riffs on the folk tale, transporting the reader into a gothic Europe which, like its California-set predecessor, is not only free of morals and moralising but positively allergic to the very thought of them. DeWitt’s characters are never either truly good or fully bad. Instead, and more interestingly, they are specimens of flawed but game humanity, baffled souls struggling in a Petri dish, oddly touching to watch.
From a bedroom in the Castle Von Aux, where he has taken on the baroquely titled job of undermajordomo, the young Lucien Minor, AKA Lucy, observes the local war by telescope. But who is fighting whom, and why, will remain a mystery, for this is Olde Europe, where they indulge in convoluted and meaningless battles and eat pork knuckle served in nettle sauce, and frankly, that is all we need to know. As an element of the novel’s quaint, breezily ludicrous backdrop, the conflict serves to illustrate the bravado and relish with which DeWitt (pictured) conjures and populates a universe on his own non‑negotiable terms.
This is the territory of the Brothers Grimm, as seen through the skewed lens of Wes Anderson or Monty Python, a place of wood-chopping and petty thieving and puppies drowned in buckets, where they speak a Euro-Biblical-Yiddishy scramble of “and then they did do this” and “enough already”. And why shouldn’t that work? It works.
Having catapulted the disarmingly weedy Lucy into the home of a mysteriously absent baron, DeWitt unleashes a frolicsome chain of intrigues, featuring a pair of vaudevillian pickpockets, a local beauty, a clutch of decadent aristocrats and some hazardous geology.
While Lucy lacks the complexity and nuance of the casually brutal Eli of The Sisters Brothers, who is compelling from the first page, he is nonetheless an appealing creation – the more so for his immaturity, occasional pomposity and propensity to tell shakily constructed whoppers. Savouring the euphoria of having successfully deployed one, he walks away “on the springy legs of a foal”, reflecting: “How remarkable a thing a lie is. He wondered if it weren’t man’s finest achievement, and after some consideration, decided that it was.” In DeWitt’s world, nobody’s inner child stays on the inside for long.
It is in this genial, ludic mode that Lucy’s journey continues, with detours into backstory, flights of quirky irrelevance, and pauses to enjoy odd moments such as the deathbed scene of an old criminal looking back on life and triumphantly failing to repent. Although the plot contains a few richly satisfying twists, anticipatory chapter headings such as “The Location, Apprehension, and Restoration to Normality of the Baron” suggest that DeWitt’s game is not really surprise: when a silent mynah bird enters the mix, we know it is only a matter of time before the bird will utter, and when a Very Large Hole makes its appearance, we know that a central character will somehow fall in.
None of which is to the detriment of a novel that has a lot of knowing fun with its fun: if Undermajordomo Minor occasionally lacks the heft and panache of The Sisters Brothers, it only proves the rule that great acts are murderously hard to follow.
Liz Jensen’s The Uninvited is published by Bloomsbury.
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