McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. Simon and Schuster New York 1985. F;12/25.

This is a long and widely-admired tale of American cowboys in the late 1870s. But I’d say it would be a mistake to dismiss it as a standard “western”. The main plot involves a journey by former Texas Rangers who switch to herding thousands of cattle north to Montana. But the heart of the story grows out of McMurtry’s imagining characters whose truth is magnified by the sharp lens of their violent and harsh long ago situation. Cowboys, whores, indians, townspeople, a couple of experienced fighters and about a dozen bizarre eccentric individuals steadily grew in my imagination through the 850 or so pages.

The plot is complex and I won’t narrate the whole thing. You can be bored and scared off reading this fine story by any of the vapid summaries online. A bit like my experience of War and Peace and Infinite Jest it’s the characters and how they affect one another that had real dramatic impact for me. I’ll just describe some of my impressions.

Augustus (“Gus”) McCrae and Woodrow Call are the leaders of the Texas Rangers (who are rendered in retrospect) and of the cattle drive of about 1500 miles. Their relationship is a study in contrast. Gus is an imaginative educated man looking for adventure and interesting relationships. Call is a powerful obsessive fighter and leader who has no use for Gus’s constant dreamy rambling.

Call himself spent plenty of time on self-appraisal. He knew what he could certainly do, and what he might do if he was lucky, and what he couldn’t do barring a miracle. The problem with Gus was that he regarded himself as the miracle.

Once in a while Call would fall into blue spells—times when he seemed almost paralyzed by doubts he never voiced. The blue spells never came at a time of real crisis. Call thrived on crisis. They were brought on by little accidents, like the wagon breaking.

Gus is irresistible to women and is emotionally involved with the two most important females in the story.

Lorena (one of them, young and wonderfully attractive) noticed that (Gus) sounded happier than she had heard him sound (before) … She knew exactly what it meant. She had often seen him looking at Clara (the other one) with helpless love in his eyes.

Death and violence are part of the territory. Surprise lives in McMurtry’s repertoire and I was taken by it again and again. A young cowboy is overwhelmed by poisonous snakes as they cross a river:

The giant worms were snakes—water moccasins … the screams had started just as Mouse and the steer reached the top of the bank … then the screams stopped abruptly as Sean slipped under the water.

Native Indians and many of the white cowboys and hunters can be vicious and often motiveless killers. Fear of the natives never completely leaves the minds of the cowboys heading north. Wild animals with their innate motives are often a problem as well.

Jake Spoon is one of the original Rangers and a ladies’ man who is nearly killed in a town when he approaches a pretty teenage girl sitting on a wagon. But (PLOT ALERT) Jake later on falls in with vicious murderers and Gus and Call are forced to hang him for the deaths and for stealing horses.

McMurtry is also a master of romantic and psychological suspense. There’s a lovely resolution of Gus’s apparently impossible dilemma of having rescued Lorena from Indians who raped and nearly killed her and who is now helplessly dependent on him. They arrive at the ranch of the former love of his life Clara. “(Gus) knew he could not simply ride by Clara, whatever the threat of turmoil or disappointment. Of all the women he knew, she had meant the most.” Brilliant reasonable Clara isn’t ready to marry Gus, but she and her daughters provide Lorena with the warmth of home that she didn’t realize she needed (although in her prostitute days she’d dreamt of going to San Francisco) and she stays with them (END PLOT ALERT).

Another romantic pair is young July Johnson, sheriff in one of the towns who has married Elmira. Like Call and McCrae these two show McMurtry’s fascination with different incompatible people thrown together and how obsessively ordered people like Call and July can have their hearts broken by their opposites, who are chasing wild dreams.

July didn’t like for things to be out of the ordinary in his life. It seemed to him it was better to do as other people did—if society at large did things a certain way it had to be for a good reason, and he looked upon common practices as rules that should be obeyed.

Elmira held this in disgusted contempt and left July who had gone after a fugitive to get on a whiskey boat going north, chasing her former husband who was a horse of a more entertaining colour. She has July’s baby while at Clara’s but leaves again only to be killed by Indians.

Clara was described by a reviewer as “the conscience of the story” and true to McMurtry’s way with fictional women she has at least the moral judgement and a lot of the horse breaking skills of the best among the men:

“Ought don’t count for as much as a gnat, when you’re talking about love,” Clara said. “(Elmira) didn’t even care for Martin (July and Elmira’s baby). We’ve already given July and Martin more love than that poor woman ever gave them. … I’m sorry she had no more control of herself to run off from her husband and child and get killed.” She stopped, to let the girls work on the various questions a little. It interested her which they would pick as the main point.

Newt, a young cowboy and part of the cattle drive, is unbeknownst to almost everyone Call’s son with the only woman Call has had any relationship with, but who died shortly after childbirth. Newt is a sensitive boy who several times “felt so sad that he almost embarrassed himself by crying. He felt his eyes fill up” but who consistent with the emotional realities of the story “put (his first) gun belt around his waist and felt the gun’s solid weight against his hip… (and) felt grown and complete for the first time in his life.” It’s one of Call’s great struggles to make himself tell Newt he was his father.

At one point Call who is not a big man comes out of a store in a town and sees a huge mounted army scout with uniformed men around him beating Newt with a whip. Call rips the man off his horse and bare-handedly nearly kills him until he is dragged away by Gus and others. There’s no dearth of emotional power in many scenes like that.

I seemed to keep comparing this story to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The action of both novels took place at around the same time (1850s to 1870s). The two authors were also almost exact contemporaries (mid-1930s to early 2010s). One of McMurtry’s strengths is his strange improbable frontier people who appear briefly in some of the many subplots but who are still very real. This seems to me similar to Anton Chechov was doing when his characters come to life even as they are described in what seems at first like simple recitation of events. Blood Meridian has no female main characters, Lonesome Dove brings us at least two as fully moving as the important men. But McCarthy’s thrilling poetic impact is in a different league than McMurtry’s in my opinion.

I hope you won’t be confused or disappointed (as I am a bit) reading this review. It’s not the first time I’ve had the impression of failing to do justice to something really worthwhile.

A few people have called Lonesome Dove “The”great American novel. No doubt in my mind Americans are not the only people who would appreciate it. But its cowboys and indians content can only be found in one place in the world. Thinking back to my experience of Americans like Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Morrison, and Wallace McMurtry’s story gripped my interest and got me thinking about what I’m looking for in long fiction in a similar way to some of those other famous voices.

I strongly suggest you give it a try. I don’t think many readers would close this book prematurely once they decided to take it on.

9.6/9.1