Book Review: Readings

Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother

by Douglas A. Martin

Soft Skull, 256 pp., $13.95 (paper)

It would be reasonable to fear that, in writing Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother, Douglas A. Martin would scare off that segment of the population who unwillingly trudged through Wuthering Heights in high school or fell asleep reading the CliffsNotes of Jane Eyre. As large as the cult of Brontë is, there is a sizable population for whom the mention of Heathcliff or Rochester only provokes dismal memories of AP English. Still, even for those who'd rather read Encyclopaedia Britannica cover to cover than revisit the Brontës, Branwell is a worthwhile read, a novel that recalls the best aspects of those books – the damp, dark, and foreboding heaths; the madness; the unseemly secrets lurking in the attic – but lacks their more conventional features, not least the happy endings.

Branwell is a novel describing not so much the arc of Branwell's character as his steady decline. Branwell is an alcoholic and an opium addict, and the novel approximates his intoxication brilliantly; his own experience is portrayed viscerally and vividly, with heightened sensation and drama, while all else seems described as if obscured by a thick moorland fog. Though academics have often theorized that Branwell's downfall was spurred by an unsuccessful affair with the appropriately named Mrs. Robinson, whose son he tutored, Martin takes a different tack entirely, positing that Branwell's madness was a result of his struggle with his own homosexuality. Though Martin is not the first to suggest this, his alternative interpretations of historical facts form a cohesive and convincing portrait of the lost, forgotten Brontë. Martin is also a poet, and his painterly depictions of the English countryside and the Brontës' own parsonage – complete with graveyard and listing, crumbling tombstones – set a scene fertile with inspiration for the sisters' novels. The book also makes interesting suggestions as to Branwell's hand in the writing of Wuthering Heights and his potential role as the inspiration for Charlotte's madwoman, but it is also a compelling story without regard to its intertextual connections.

It takes time to adjust to the narrative's style, which is syntactically unconventional, replete with question-markless questions, unattributed dialogue, and midsentence tense changes (also, puzzlingly, "Brontë" is spelled correctly on the cover but without the diaeresis throughout the book, which is initially distracting). At first, its voice seems to be that of unjaded youth, when everything seems possible and is therefore weighted with a gravitas lost in adulthood. The Brontë sisters are convinced that brother Branwell will be the family's salvation, a hope that even a reader unfamiliar with the family's history knows will not be realized, a suspicion confirmed as the narration grows darker. It's a challenge to write from a naive perspective about characters whose fates are predetermined, and at times Martin's writing falters and recalls the winking smugness and condescension characteristic of omniscient Regency narrators. For the most part, though, Martin's lyric, opium-dream narrative is evocative enough that one inhabits Branwell's own dark skull-cave. Though rooted in the past, Branwell is a distinctly modern novel, and its protagonist a modern and (yes, I'll say it) existential antihero.