Summary
Narrated in the first person by Michael, the novel’s protagonist, Brother opens with a prologue in which Michael recounts the time his older brother, Francis, showed him a hydroelectricity pole he liked to climb. The pole is in an abandoned parking lot. From the top, you can see the whole of Toronto. But Michael’s brother warns him to remember where to place his hands and feet because of the risk of electrocution. Michael remembers how his brother taught him this lesson about the importance of memory.
In Chapter One, Michael meets Aisha, a childhood acquaintance, on a snowy day. It is the first time they’ve seen each other in ten years. She has been living overseas, but has now returned to Scarborough, Ontario because her father was in intensive care with cancer-related problems. He died after a week, and now Aisha is visiting Michael in their old neighborhood, the Park, and staying with Michael.
Michael still lives in the crumbling apartment building where Aisha used to live too as a kid. He shows her inside, where his mother is watching TV. They creep quietly to his bedroom, and he explains that he’ll sleep on the couch. She asks if his mother doesn’t speak anymore. He says she does, but she is quiet sometimes. Michael feels shame for thinking he could end the night with talk of sleeping arrangements and avoiding bringing up the “loss shadowing this room and measured in the ten years of silence between” them. Aisha says she still thinks of Francis, Michael’s older brother.
Michael comments that he and his brother were raised alone by his mother, who was from Trinidad, or the West Indies as it used to be called. Their father, who was a dark-skinned Indian man also from Trinidad, left when the boys were three and two, and he lived somewhere in the city as well. Their mother works as a cleaner. Too proud to accept anyone’s help, she worked as much as she could, which meant leaving her boys alone at home often.
Though their mother gives them strict instructions to stay in and do homework, Francis leads Michael out to explore Scarborough, a working-class district on the outskirts of Toronto. In the 1980s, when the boys are young, a large number of non-white immigrants settle in the area, many from former British colonies. The boys sometimes suffer nightmares, influenced by their seeing other boys suddenly thrown to the pavement by cops and arrested, hearing rumors of boys getting jumped and beaten, and seeing news stories about predators and gang killings.
Michael and his brother like to visit the Rouge Valley, a glacial valley that is a “wound in the earth” of greenery and parkway running through the neighborhood. The last time they go together, Francis is fourteen. Francis gives Michael a Molson Canadian from a six-pack. They drink together and listen to the burble of the thin creek and traffic on the bridge above.
Michael comments on how, in his teenage years, Francis stops going to school and begins working, bringing groceries home. One day, their mother hears he has been hanging out at a barbershop called Desirea’s with local boys who are known to police. She slaps Francis and says no son of hers is a criminal. Strangely, Francis smiles, as if the slap were a victory.
A month after the slap, Francis informs Michael that he plans to go away in about a week. Michael points out that their mother depends on his support. Francis says Michael will help her now, but that Francis will send back money. Michael comments that earlier that week they had witnessed Anton, a small-time drug dealer, get shot outside their complex. Francis had touched the body on the ground, then wiped his hand on his track pants.
The cops arrived and arrested them both, pushing Francis to the ground and scratching his cheek. But they were just made to wait on a side street until a cop came, assessed them quickly, and took them home. The neighborhood changed: it was a buzz of police and television vehicles, the locals’ faces blank.
Analysis
The short prologue that opens Brother introduces the central relationship of the book while establishing the major theme of protectiveness. Through the lesson on climbing the hydro pole, which sees Francis emphasize to Michael the importance of following his steps closely to avoid danger, Chariandy presents an example of the boys’ broader mentor-mentee relationship. In the void left by their absent father, Francis develops a sense of responsibility for Michael’s well-being. In the prologue, Francis stresses the importance of following his example and keeping the memory sharp. This statement has resonance throughout the book to come, as Chariandy depicts Michael going back in his memory to retrace every step that leads to Francis’s untimely death, which is ultimately a consequence of Francis’s protective instinct.
In Chapter One, the reader catches up with Michael in the present-day narrative frame the novel takes. Ten years after the “loss” of his older brother, Michael lives with their mother, Ruth, in the same townhouse in a low-income neighborhood of Scarborough where they have always lived. The inciting incident for Michael’s narration of the story is the return of Aisha, an ex-girlfriend and neighbor who has come to stay following her father’s death from cancer. Although he urged her to visit, Michael now seems to regret showing her how he and his mentally unstable mother live. The theme of protectiveness arises again as Michael feels the need to shield his mother from Aisha’s judgment.
In these opening scenes, Chariandy also introduces the major themes of grief and denial by hinting at Francis’s death but not revealing yet what happened to him. Michael’s denial of his trauma is evident in his desire not to discuss Francis with Aisha and to avoid the "loss" that is “shadowing” the room in which his mother sits. Chariandy then introduces the book’s back-and-forth structure, cutting between the present-day frame and Michael’s memories of when Francis was alive.
Michael provides the context for his and Francis’s lives by commenting on how the boys grew up in a multicultural district of eastern Toronto called Scarborough, which has a population with a very high proportion of immigrants. The boys are raised by their single mother, who must give up her ambition of becoming a nurse after the boys’ father abandons the family. Because Ruth works long hours as a cleaner to support herself and her sons, the boys roam their community without supervision, always somewhat afraid of the violence and crime of which they hear rumors or see sensationalized in the news.
Discrimination—another of the book’s most important themes—enters the narrative when Michael discusses Ruth’s physical assault on Francis. Having learned her son has not only stopped going to school but has begun associating with people she suspects of being criminals, Ruth slaps Francis in the face with a key in her hand, drawing blood.
In this scene, Ruth's behavior is exemplary of the society-wide discrimination against young people of color, which influences the way those young people are treated. With no evidence of Francis having done anything illegal, she treats him as though he is a morally bankrupt disgrace, unaware that he and his friends hang out at the barbershop in large part because it is among the few places that welcome them. But despite the pain Francis must feel, in an instance of situational irony, he appears to encourage Ruth’s discriminatory view of him, smiling in satisfaction at having been rejected by his mother in such a violent manner.
