Though it is a novel, Philippe Besson's successor to his acclaimed 'In The Absense Of Men' has the harrowing ring of painfully earned truth. It is a book about death and about love, about the permanence and transience of sibling ties and sibling rivalries; about what it means to always be thought of as "his brother".
Lucas's brother Thomas is dying. His blood platelet count has suddenly and catastrophically fallen, for reasons his doctors are finding hard to establish; on the He de Re in south-western France, the holiday home of their childhood, the two brothers wait for Lucas to die.
Besson's dispassionate, almost clinical observation of disease and death going about their business is hauntingly reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece 'A Very Easy Death'. Lucas portrays the insensitivity and inability of others to cope with Thomas's illness, alongside the petty cruelties of the medical system; though he is both pained and outraged, these faults emerge as the all-too-human failings of those outside the brotherhood.
Lucas interweaves the chronicle of his brother's death with memories of their childhood and adolescence, their jealousies and rivalries, their unspoken bonds, beside which the wider world- parents, partners, friends- fade into relative insignificance. As those around them withdraw from this inexplicable, inexorable death, Lucas and Thomas retreat to their childhood paradise to wait for the end.
'His Brother' is both powerful and haunting, by turns disinterested and disturbing, lyrical and expressive; Besson's command of language and his matchless eye for the minutiae of death linger long after the book is closed.
