Brothers – William Goldman (1985)

Brothers by William Goldman, published in 1985, is the long-awaited sequel to his earlier novel Marathon Man (1974), a gripping thriller that blends espionage, conspiracy, and personal vengeance. While Marathon Man focused on Babe Levy’s entanglement in a terrifying Nazi plot, Brothers expands the narrative world and deepens the psychological and thematic weight of its predecessor. Though the novel revisits some familiar characters and conflicts, it unfolds with more complexity and ambition, featuring high-level political intrigue and violent subterfuge on a global scale.

Plot Summary

In the stillness of the Caribbean, a man with a body carved by solitude and discipline moved through ritual – swimming at dawn, punishing his hands with sand, chasing birds for agility. He had once been called Scylla. Once been dead. Now, reshaped by radical surgery and years of secrecy, he lived for recall. Not to rejoin life, but to return to the field of death, for violence had always been the only thing that made sense to him. The Division had saved him from the grave, rebuilt him, left him alone until he was needed. And now, the sound of a distant helicopter marked the end of exile.

In England, two young boys – Stan and Ollie – strolled hand in hand through the village of Tring, their innocence manifest in their laughter and their hunger for sweets. They entered a candy shop, won over the gruff proprietor with charm and cleverness, and left with bags of chocolate, including a gift of rare white bars. They were perfection. Too perfect. As they skipped down Tring Mews, Ollie stumbled, the candy spilled, and a metallic object arced across the street toward number sixteen. A boiler explosion, they said. But only a few wept. Not for the boys. Not for the two children who’d been erased without a trace of mourning. Because no one had known them for what they were. The experiment had ended before it began.

Connie was a woman of tight jeans, sharp instincts, and firm resolve. She knew what power her body held. Men watched her; men followed her. But only Arnie, brutal, paranoid, and worshipful, held her close enough to bruise. They danced their dangerous romance through the nightclubs of Manhattan, through alleyways and backseats. Arnie, once a fighter cursed with brittle bones, poured his rage into his fists, and into anyone who dared touch Connie. He wanted the world to suffer as he had.

On a night drenched in sweat and vodka, Connie met a man in a suit, silver-haired and delicate. Standish. He spoke like a poet, moved like a spider, and saw everything. He watched her, studied her, knew exactly what she was. And he knew what Arnie was too. When Arnie emerged from the shadows and beat another man senseless in an alley for touching her, Standish only smiled. He had found his instruments.

They were invited to Standish’s penthouse – a cathedral of luxury and design. Standish welcomed them with open arms and hidden plans. He was building a team. Recruiting. His job was not to judge monsters, but to find the right ones. And Arnie and Connie – psychotic, perverse, perfect – fit his needs precisely.

Across the ocean, Fern, a woman of limited imagination and supreme obedience, had failed to put on her gloves before entering a car. One fingerprint might doom her. She didn’t wonder why she was given instructions to engage children in Tring or what the explosion meant. Her orders were to drive. So she drove. She liked not knowing.

In the shadows of global power, a new operation unfolded. The Division, once purged and dismantled, now whispered back to life. Scylla returned to its service, and with him, the old ghosts stirred. He was no longer the same man, but his purpose remained unchanged – eliminate threats, carry out the unimaginable. His handlers briefed him with caution. There had been an experiment – a genetic engineering project involving children. Perfect children. Born to be weapons. And someone was killing them.

In a pristine kindergarten in South America, a blond child painted with perfect symmetry. Moments later, the school was nothing but flame. In a different hemisphere, a small boy was lured from a park and never found again. One by one, the engineered children vanished – either eradicated or activated. No one knew which was worse.

Scylla followed the trail, each step unraveling the twisted legacy of The Division. He saw how the children had been created – cloned, manipulated, trained. No families. No choice. Just purpose. Yet they were discarded like broken toys when the ethics soured, and now someone was cleaning up the evidence. Or reassembling it.

Standish, the architect of silence, had his hands in every shadow. Arnie and Connie were dispatched like rabid dogs, leaving corpses across continents. They were not told why, only given names and promises. Their violence came easily. When one target, a child hidden in a Central American clinic, survived their assault, the first cracks began to show.

Scylla crossed their path in silence. He did not strike immediately. He observed. Measured. Understood. Arnie’s strength was in his rage, his violence unthinking. Connie’s power lay in seduction and survival. But neither could match the discipline of a man who had been dead and returned harder than bone. When they finally met, there was no need for long speeches. Scylla moved like inevitability, and Arnie fell like a tower. Connie fled.

Standish watched from afar. The mission was incomplete. One child remained – the last success of the Tring experiment. A girl, hidden in plain sight, her existence known only to a few. Scylla’s orders were clear: find her. Protect her. Or kill her, if necessary.

He found her in an orphanage near Prague, quiet and drawing chalk suns on the pavement. She looked up at him, saw not the monster, but the man. She asked if he would play. For a moment, Scylla hesitated. His hands, forged for death, rested at his sides. The decision did not come from training. It came from memory – of Babe, of innocence, of the boy he once was. He turned away from the target.

But the girl did not live. Standish had sent another. Fern, obedient and unfeeling, arrived later that night with a syringe and a whisper. When Scylla returned to the orphanage and found the bed empty, the chalk drawings half-washed by rain, something inside him fractured.

He returned to Standish not with fists, but with silence. The man in the three-piece suit extended his hand, offered the next mission. Scylla took it, then broke every bone in it. He did not speak. He did not wait. He finished what he had come back for.

In a cold room, under harsh lights, Scylla sat alone. The Division would come again. With new names, new orders. He would be ready. Not for them. Not for missions. But for the only purpose that remained – the war against those who never bled but ordered others to.

The rain outside the safehouse came soft and unending. Somewhere, birds called in the distance. He listened.

Main Characters

• Scylla (a.k.a. Doc) – Once believed dead, Scylla is the legendary government assassin resurrected through radical surgeries and hidden away on a remote island to train and heal. Scarred both physically and emotionally, Scylla is a brutal yet introspective force whose identity is forged in pain, discipline, and violent service. His internal conflict about humanity, loyalty, and personal redemption drives much of the novel’s tension.

• Babe Levy – A recurring figure from Marathon Man, Babe is Scylla’s younger brother and a professor. Though central in the previous novel, Babe’s role in Brothers is more psychological and symbolic. Scylla’s memories of Babe haunt him, reflecting his buried longing for family and normalcy, contrasting with the cold, clinical world of intelligence work.

• Standish – A refined, enigmatic, and sinister orchestrator of the book’s central operation. Standish is a manipulator of people and events, operating from the shadows with charm and lethal calculation. He embodies the amorality of institutional power.

• Connie – A seductive and cunning young woman, Connie’s outward vulnerability masks a lethal core. She is as dangerous as she is beautiful, operating in tandem with her lover Arnie. Their violent relationship is at once grotesque and intimate, making them a disturbing pair of instruments in Standish’s plan.

• Arnie – A volatile and psychopathic thug with a brutal past and fragile masculinity. Arnie’s obsession with violence and dominance makes him both a weapon and a liability. His relationship with Connie is filled with twisted devotion and explosive sexuality, enhancing the novel’s undercurrent of psychological disturbance.

Theme

• Identity and Transformation: At its core, Brothers explores the fluidity and fragmentation of identity. Scylla’s physical transformation after his “death” symbolizes a deeper existential rebirth, as he struggles to reconcile his former self with what he has become. Others, too, like Connie and Arnie, wear social masks that hide their violent realities.

• Loyalty and Betrayal: Nearly every character is caught in webs of shifting allegiance. Whether it is familial loyalty between Babe and Scylla, or professional deception in the intelligence community, the novel meditates on trust as a scarce and dangerous commodity.

• Governmental and Institutional Corruption: The Division, the secretive government agency, epitomizes the cold, utilitarian mindset of institutional power. It manipulates lives for abstract ends, suggesting that in the game of nations, individual lives are expendable pawns.

• Violence as Communication and Control: Violence in Brothers is not just physical—it is psychological, strategic, even erotic. Characters use violence to exert control, assert identity, or communicate twisted intimacy. This motif reflects the moral bankruptcy of the world the characters inhabit.

• Isolation and Alienation: From Scylla’s exile on an uninhabited island to Fern’s disconnection from human emotion, the novel is populated by characters who are fundamentally alone. Emotional alienation reinforces the pervasive atmosphere of paranoia and psychological decay.

Writing Style and Tone

William Goldman’s writing in Brothers is a masterclass in cinematic suspense and psychological penetration. He blends hard-edged dialogue with lyrical introspection, creating a dual narrative mode that shifts between brutal action and haunting internal reflection. The pacing is taut, the scenes often short and vivid, reminiscent of screenplay structure—unsurprising given Goldman’s screenwriting background. This cinematic quality allows Goldman to evoke dread and anticipation with surgical precision.

The tone of the novel is unrelentingly dark, steeped in cynicism and existential despair. Even moments of humor carry a bitter edge, serving to highlight the characters’ detachment from traditional moral frameworks. Goldman’s portrayal of violence is unflinching, and the sexual politics of the novel—particularly the brutal relationship between Arnie and Connie—serve as a disturbing mirror of the power dynamics present throughout the narrative. Yet, amid the darkness, flickers of humanity endure, often in the form of memory, desire, or a yearning for connection. These moments lend the novel a tragic dimension, making it more than just a thriller—it is a meditation on the cost of survival.