In the acknowledgments of this short, sharp shock of a novel, David Chariandy quotes a line from Antigone. It is the briefest of references but very apt, given that his preoccupation with sibling loyalties and kinships, rebel brothers and the importance of giving the dead their dignity chimes so much with those of Sophocles’s drama.
Its narrator is a young black Canadian, Michael, who has grown up close to his brother Francis, one year his elder, and whose untimely death he is mourning in this novel.
They live with their Trinidadian-born single mother, who works as a cleaner in a run-down district of Toronto. We first meet Michael 10 years after Francis has lost his life, aged 19, and the story unravels backwards. Michael is now 28 and the past replays in his mind in parallel chapters to the present day, in which he is caring for his mother and working gruelling hours in a storeroom.
Memory played a big part in Chariandy’s debut, Soucouyant, about a mother suffering from dementia. Michael’s mother shows signs of dementia too, or at least confusion brought on by grief. What is most poignant here is Michael’s memory of her as a fierce, strict mother with an indomitable spirit – a far cry from the broken woman she is now: “For the past 10 years, I’ve been careful with Mother. I’ve kept to a minimum all discomforting talk about the past.”
The sibling relationship is beautifully conveyed (Francis’s effortless popularity, his protectiveness, Michael’s adoration of Francis) and with such tenderness that Francis’s death is devastating when it comes. Every chapter builds to the inevitability of this moment and is freighted with a great and awful fatalism.
Brother is not just a study of Francis, but a dark bildungsroman about boys – who are part of a black underclass – turning into men. Chariandy describes their hopes and desires: Francis’s ambitions to be a hip-hop artist, his gay desire, and Michael’s first relationship with a neighbour.
This is a slim novel, yet Chariandy manages to encompass a world with astonishing detail and feeling inside it: the family’s acute poverty is conveyed particularly well and the sense of alienation it brings, such as when the family visit a shopping mall and are made to feel unwelcome: “As we moved from store to store, the clerks seemed especially attentive to us. Mother hadn’t changed out of her uniform, and her sneakers sounded her approach on the market floors with a funny squeaking sound.”
Chariandy describes the vulnerabilities of the powerless in other moving passages: the way in which the mother pretends she is not hungry in order that her boys have enough to eat; the way the brothers must play along each time they are stopped and searched by the police.
Especially astute is Chariandy’s depiction of the hostile white gaze: the police officers in Brother look upon all black men as potential suspects and treat them as such. This aspect of the book feels urgent given the Black Lives Matter movement.
Michael talks of “complicated grief”, of “losses that mire a person in mourning, that prevent them from moving forward…” In his own case, there is a sense of social injustice but also knowledge of his impotence to right the wrong that has taken place – he is simply too poor and powerless – and this is what stalls his healing process.
It took Chariandy a decade to write Brother, and it is a breathtaking achievement. It is a compulsive, brutal and flawless novel that is full of accomplished storytelling with not a word spare. It is not just about a particular place or poverty or institutional racism, but about the ardour of brotherly love and the loneliness of grief.
• Brother by David Chariandy is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.59 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
