Having catapulted the disarmingly weedy Lucy into the home of a mysteriously absent baron, DeWitt unleashes a frolicsome chain of intrigues, featuring a pair of vaudevillian pickpockets, a local beauty, a clutch of decadent aristocrats and some hazardous geology. This is the territory of the Brothers Grimm, as seen through the skewed lens of Wes Anderson or Monty Python, a place of wood-chopping and petty thieving and puppies drowned in buckets, where they speak a Euro-Biblical-Yiddishy scramble of “and then they did do this” and “enough already”. As an element of the novel’s quaint, breezily ludicrous backdrop, the conflict serves to illustrate the bravado and relish with which DeWitt (pictured) conjures and populates a universe on his own non‑negotiable terms. But who is fighting whom, and why, will remain a mystery, for this is Olde Europe, where they indulge in convoluted and meaningless battles and eat pork knuckle served in nettle sauce, and frankly, that is all we need to know. Instead, and more interestingly, they are specimens of flawed but game humanity, baffled souls struggling in a Petri dish, oddly touching to watch.įrom a bedroom in the Castle Von Aux, where he has taken on the baroquely titled job of undermajordomo, the young Lucien Minor, AKA Lucy, observes the local war by telescope. DeWitt’s characters are never either truly good or fully bad. In Undermajordomo Minor, his rickety, occasionally shambolic but engaging new flight of fancy, he riffs on the folk tale, transporting the reader into a gothic Europe which, like its California-set predecessor, is not only free of morals and moralising but positively allergic to the very thought of them. In the much-loved Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers, he memorably reinvented the western in a poignant comic drama of greed, grit and ruthlessness starring a pair of contract killers. The Canadian writer Patrick deWitt has nerve.

Undermajordomo minor by patrick dewitt