Customer Reviews

Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother

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This isn't a straightforward biography of Branwell Bronte, it is much better than that.

Douglas Martin is a poet and this book is a beautiful poetic dream, using the dark, damp, brooding atmosphere of the moors and parsonage to set the scene. Branwell's relationship with his sisters, his involvement with their writings, his drug and alcohol abuse and eventual downfall are all brilliantly portrayed.

Douglas Martin has a deceptively simple style of writing, very easy to read. I don't know of any other author who can convey so much meaning and emotion in so few words. He never tries to give a complete picture, the narrative is fragmentary, and he doesn't draw conclusions. Subtly outlining such issues such as Branwell's sexuality and his sudden dismissal from his post as tutor at Thorp Green, he leaves it to the readers to decide for themselves what actually happened. His extensive knowledge of the Bronte family and their writings comes across clearly.

It's tempting to read the book quickly, but don't do that - you will miss a lot of the subtleties in the text. The more you reread this book, the better it gets - brilliant!

The historical narrative of the one and only Bronte son, BRANWELL is a grand gesture, Martin's style is so dreamily crafted. The author not only reconstructs the permanent veiling of Branwell's spirit by way of his sisters' fame, but through prose as mesmeric as that found in his previous works, it seems as though Martin personally knows his protagonist, Patrick "Branwell" Bronte, alighting the years between with dexterity unlike any other. Martin is a time traveler and his books well-oiled machines, facilitating insight, enlightening, and grooming audiences for what is yet to come. This novel continues to educate far beyond its first reading.

Consider three extraordinary girls and their brother who is only extraordinary because he breathed the same air and trod the same ground as his sisters, and is famous only by osmosis. Branwell Bronte was a failure, an excruciating failure, because he had the intellect but not the talent or the fiber to succeed as an artist or a writer. And he had to watch as his sisters spun their marvelous tales and became household names while he plunged deeper and deeper into a world of opium.

And indeed, this superb novel is written as the stuff of dreams, of a delirium, of a misty world in which Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne appear almost as wraiths, as ghosts on the moors, gone from this world in the blink of an eye. Nothing seems to be quite real, but this is Branwell's story, and poet Martin gives him understanding, substance and depth. Yet he is illusive, too, his red hair a badge of bravado but the rest of him fading away a bit more after each failure until he sunk into his death- bed, a hollow husk of the young man who had once shown such promise.

"Branwell" is a lyrical book, written by the hand and heart of a poet. In a way, in this book, Branwell comes into his own because we can identify with him so well. Highly recommended.

BRANWELL is an historical novel which tells the story of the Bronte family from the perspective of the black sheep brother, about whom most readers only know he was painted out of the family portrait. Like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (about the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre), Branwell enhances any reading of the sister's novels.

in a cauldron of literary brooding, sensuality, and suspense. Martin's performance is deliriously seductive.

I didn't find this book poetic, mood-evoking, or compelling at all. The writing is artsy-fartsy affectation. Not to mention shallow and trite.

I've been reading books by and about the Brontes for most of my life. This includes literary criticism, biographies, and fictional novels based on their lives. With fiction a writer can speculate, take some liberties, expand on ideas concerning a famous literary genius' personality. That's to be expected and the result is often alluring. However, in this novel, there seems to be no setting of historical place. We have no idea if and when we are in the 18-teens, when Branwell was born, or the 1840's, when Branwell died. There is no background, no atmosphere, whether of the Yorkshire moors or England itself. Branwell Bronte's father and famous literary sisters are just names to be mentioned, shadowy puppets in the background, stick figures enacting the simplest reactions. There's no description - just a queasy glut of mood, if that's what it's to be called. The inferrence of Branwell's activities is the worst of all. The author coyly skirts around Branwell's "depravity", never settling in on naming it, only hinting at what might have occurred, and slithering the supposed events over with an oily, liquor-and-laudenaum-soaked fog of guessing.

Reknown Bronte historian and researcher Juliet Barker has proven without doubt, in discovering transcribed eyewitness accounts of the time, that Branwell Bronte did indeed have a sexual affair with his employer, Lydia Robinson, which was the direct cause for his dismissal as the Robinson son's tutor. He also known to have impregnanted one, perhaps two young women in neighborhoods where he was elsewhere employed. Whether or not he was also engaged in clandestine homosexual activities is something which has not been sufficiently proven even though it's been popular to hint at it for the past three decades (Barker refutes it, as well as do other contemporary Bronte biographers), but this was Branwell's own personal business anyway. What he definitely was not was a pedophile preying upon the child of the family for whom he worked. Artistic license has gone too far and made a sympathetic if pitiful historical figure repugnant, and to not zero in on the reactions of the protagonists, the effects upon all concerned, however fictional this device, is a cop-out. Instead the smarmy curtain of "mood" remains.

I think this book was a sorry failure at what it was attempting. Immediately upon finishing - for I forced myself to get through the entire thing - I tossed it into the giveaway pile - only because I can't bear to throw any book, no matter how bad, into the garbage can.