Unless you count the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which reads like one continuous book rather than three installments, Lonesome Dove is the longest book I've ever read. Like Captains Gus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call and their 3000 stolen Mexican cattle in the book, I hauled through this thing without looking back. After sixteen days, doing about 40 pages a day for the first week and pushing myself to an average of about over the last ten days, I polished it off.
The book begins in the small town of Lonesome Dove, located on our side of the Texas-Mexico border, right after the Civil War. Most land west of the Mississippi is still relatively untouched, with little meccas of population in Denver, San Francisco and Ft. Worth, but not much else. Two retired border rangers, Captains McCrae and Call, the book's two main protagonists, abruptly decide to uproot themselves from their home and take a massive herd of cattle, some horses and about 15 cowboys on a trek across thousands of miles to completely unsettled and unspoken-for Montana Country. They envision starting a ranch up there, developing the land and becoming wealthy when other travelers think to migrate there too for the same reasons. Their adventure takes them through dangerous Indian territory, across treacherous rivers, through rough saloon towns and over the endless American Plain.
The book is special for a few reasons. As a reader relatively new to westerns, I had long stereotyped them as merely tales about duels, cowboys and Indians; this book has all that, and it does not downplay the action, however I would classify it first and foremost as a history text and then maybe a book about love and loneliness. After decades of subduing the banditos and impoverishing the vaqueros across the Rio Grande, rendering impotent the more peaceful Native American tribes and decimating most of the hostile ones, Captains McCrae and Call seem to make the trek mostly on account of boredom and, implicitly, a thirst for more blood. McCrae, who is the more expressive and sassy of the two classically badass rangers, is entirely aware of this motive and even embraces it. McMurtry loves to give the two men ample page time to debate the issue that in many ways epitomizes the morally dubious geographic and cultural conquests our country made during the 19th century. Yet the rest of McCrae's and Call's crew are oblivious to any of the moral implications of their lives' work. What is so interesting is how McMurtry casts this rugged band of men in such a beautiful and devotional light, and for the whole ride the reader has no choice but to root for them.
If you read this, keep an eye out for how the protagonists treat the idea of revenge. What McMurtry seems to indoctrinate in this regard is pretty revelatory and progressive, I think, considering how the minds of our male leaders have worked since our country was founded.
Additionally: At the heart of the novel are about three or four great love stories that intertwine readily, and no less than 5 characters who are developed with such detail that they could easily serve as main characters in other, less ambitious books. This eye for human subtlety and interaction might be McMurtry's greatest skill. Though he does it painstakingly, sometimes taking hundreds of pages just to flush out an important relationship, it never becomes burdensome as you read it. It's always a pure joy.
There are, I believe, 4 sequels to this book and some movies. Are you kidding me? I'm going to set a 5-year goal to get to all of those, and hopefully see the movie this year. This was an amazing way to begin my year of reading, and I would wish the same upon anyone else. The characters and the setting engulfed my daily life and they are only now beginning to let go, a day after I put the book down for good.
1 comments:
Nice write-up. The movie is great, but the sequels are a let down. Parts of Streets of Laredo are quite good, but none of the sequels are in the same class as Lonesome Dove.
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