from the editor's desk
Review of ‘The Brothers Wolfe’ by Steve Hawke
Hawke, Steve. The Brothers Wolfe. Fremantle Press, 2023. RRP: $29.99, 336pp, ISBN: 9781760992262.
Fiona Wilkes
Steve Hawke’s The Brothers Wolfe (2023) is, quite simply, a love letter to Western Australia. Painted with the soft brush of fond nostalgia, the novel follows the lives of two brothers, Elliot and Athol, as they navigate inherited business dealings, family conflicts and falling in love with strong, often unyielding women. This novel is an exciting family saga chocked full of secrets, high stakes deals and emotional turmoil.
After returning from a decade in Europe, during which time he acted as a drug-runner, Elliot Wolfe sets his sights on transforming the family business and investing in various developments around Perth at the beginning of the 1980s. Among various successes in which he becomes one of the richest men in the state—a true ‘Perthonality’—Elliot mixes with dangerous criminals and bends the rules, leading, eventually, to his arrest for fraud. Early in the novel, he reflects on the ‘suburban creep north’, and thinks that ‘there was serious money to be made. By someone’ (58). He, of course, decides that he had better be that someone and, for a time, he realises this dream. Meanwhile, his younger, far less ambitious brother, Athol, takes only a slight interest in Elliot’s dealings, preferring to focus on a fledging relationship with Stella, a hard-working university student, and on the future he hopes to build with her.
My personal highlight of the novel is the sub-plot concerning the enigmatic character of Great-Aunt Ida, a shrewd businesswoman and genteel lesbian during the first half of the 20th century. Ida, who is a tough, gin-drinking woman in her eighties, strikes up a friendship with Athol and sparks his interest in the murky history of the Wolfe family. Her chapters transport the reader back to a Perth almost unrecognisable to those who walk its streets today. Originally destined to marry the male heir to a vast property in the Kimberley, Ida returns to Perth just before the outbreak of World War I and falls in love with Genevieve, whom she stays with for the rest of her life. In the 1930s, she and her brother, Rupert (the grandfather of Elliot and Athol), inherit a station from a distant uncle. The catch is that this uncle had a son with an Aboriginal woman, and that son—Charlie—is not legally allowed to inherit. This makes for an interesting tension in the family as both Ida and, eventually, Athol, feel guilty about their long-lost cousin and the money that, rather than lining the pockets of Elliot and his investors, should rightfully have gone to him.
While I would not exactly describe most of the characters in this novel as likeable, in many ways that is what makes Hawke’s novel so striking. His characters are tantalisingly real, and are offered up to their readers as flawed, complicated and often downright mean. Every family has members like these, whether we want to admit it or not. The heart of what Hawke delivers, though, is the fact that, despite the many ways these characters let one another down or intentionally hurt one another, they love each other and are willing to work to look out for one another. That is family.
Aside from the novel’s complicated family dynamics, what comes through most strikingly in this story is Hawke’s clear love for Western Australia, its many unique characters, both fictional and otherwise, and its landscape, which is described with poetic affection. When Ida stays in the Kimberley, Hawke touchingly writes that,
There were moments when she felt the soul of the country. Billabongs at dusk. A whitewashed homestead at the foot of a stony red hill softened by the yellows and greens of the spinifex. Parrots screeching in the white gums. (28)
Even in the depths of the suburbs, in which Hawke’s characters spend most of their time, there is a fondness for the types of people that inhabit the Perth of the novel. What emerges are relatively small communities formed by shared experiences; this seeps out of Hawke’s writing and touches the heart. Stella, Athol’s love interest, for example, ‘has no qualms catching the night train back to Victoria Street, or the walk back to her folks’ place where she still lives […] These are her streets and her town’ (120). There is a distinct pride in Perth peppered throughout the novel, especially when paired by frequent but parochial digs against it: the city is characterised as a backwater, both in terms of location and politics, but it is our backwater.
The Brothers Wolfe speaks to a Perth now long-gone, and is forged out of a desire to remind readers that the people and places that made our city the way it is today were complex and very human. The novel is an ode to the city and its people, and it is one that will stick with readers, finding its place beside their personal memories of adolescences spent in Perth’s sweltering suburbs.
Fiona Wilkes is a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia specialising in English & Literary Studies. Her work has been published widely, including in Westerly Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, LEON Literary Review and a variety of other publications. Her debut novel, I Remember Everything, is currently longlisted for the 2024 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award.
