Jackie Thomae’s award-winning novel, Brothers, is a versatile and engaging examination of how two half-brothers raised in separate households navigate life completely isolated from each other. Following a broad, classic, realist structure, this engrossing novel illuminates how, in Western society today, cohabitation and remarriage impact half-siblings growing up separately in dispersed families.
Thomae moves fluidly between different cultural and socio-economic viewpoints as she tackles abandonment, infidelity, ageing, racism and class bias with a light touch, avoiding preachy moralising. Her characters are fully rounded, messy and flawed, meaning you empathise with them as well as feel exasperated by them.
‘Idris didn’t see himself as a husband, much less as a father; he even only vaguely pictured himself as a wealthy man, a natural consequence of his illustrious career as a surgeon.’
Mick and Gabriel are entirely unaware of each other’s existence for over forty years. Their Senegalese father, Idris, leaves two German women pregnant in the late 1960s after finishing his studies and returning home to Dakar.
Alone in Berlin
‘Mick’s friends had always liked his mother. They thought she was cool, modern and attractive, precisely how Monika thought of herself, in fact.’
Despite their shared genetics, the brothers’ life outcomes are hugely different: Mick’s working-class East Berlin hedonistic nightlife contrasts sharply with Gabriel’s stable, secure upbringing in Leipzig with his loving grandparents after his mother dies in a moped accident on the way to work.
Growing up in East Berlin, Mick is an aimless drifter and immersed in the 1990s post-reunification club scene. His ill-fated hustles are symptomatic of his lack of money, direction, or a career path and a tendency to be heavily influenced by his volatile circle of friends and acquaintances. A drug smuggling expedition to Colombia arranged by fashion-conscious photographer, Desmond, fails because of mismanagement, bad planning and cancelled flights. Only Delia manages to get the cash for her stash, while Desmond ends up in Wormwood Scrubs in West London, and Mick drifts out of the catastrophe relatively unscathed, but penniless. This is emblematic of his life-long pattern: coasting through trouble and ducking consequences without learning from his near-misses.
Beyond the Wall
Driven to build a bulletproof life, Gabriel establishes himself as a highly successful architect. His professional prestige, wealth and comfortable married life in London with Fleur, raising their son Albert, enable him to actively avoid engaging with his racial identity. He believes that his status and social integration shield him from prejudice, until personal and professional crises force a reality check.
For both Mick and Gabriel, their absent Senegalese father is a missing piece of the puzzle, yet neither actively seeks out their paternal roots. Their status as half-brothers is an invisible thread that shapes their physical traits without shaping their lived brotherhood.
A Tale of Two Brothers
‘He read the email again. Idris wrote to tell him that he had two sisters, one in Canada and one in France, and a brother who was an architect. And then he asked him if he would like to meet.’
By keeping the brothers unaware of each other until late middle age, Thomae captures the modern phenomenon of extreme atomisation.
Shifting the perspective between the book’s two halves is an astute psychological feat. While Mick’s story is told in the third person, Gabriel’s story is mostly told in the first person by Gabriel and Fleur with other interjections of varying perspectives.
Comments and social observations are woven seamlessly into the narrative by embedding them within micro-details of daily life and indirect discourse.
‘The British comic profile of a typical German is rather basic and not particularly up to date, which doesn’t stop anyone from using it. The alleged battle over the sun loungers at the pool, football and always Hitler. It all comes out spontaneously, always brushed off straight away as a harmless joke.’
Jackie Thomae is a remarkably skilful, clever writer whose work deserves far more attention than it has so far received. With its sharp observations and subtle resonance, Brothers stays with you long after you put it down.
Will she now write a companion, follow-up novel centred on the two sisters in Canada and France? It would be an intriguing mirror to Brothers.
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