LONESOME DOVE: kind of a review

LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry

I remember watching the mini-series based on this novel a number of years ago, but except that it starred Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones I don’t recall much else. I really should try to rent it again one of these days, now that I’ve been reading McMurtry’s series of novels. The thing about having seen that series is that I can picture Duvall and Jones as the characters. It is their voices I hear as Call and Gus speak, argue and make their way over the deserts and mountains.

It’s easy to see why this book was so popular and why McMurtry received the Pulitzer Prize. He has created a fascinating cast of characters, both male and female, whom he brings to full life. Not only are the main heroes, former Texas Rangers Gus and Call, vividly portrayed but secondary characters who are only briefly introduced become ‘real’ enough that we care about their fates. Even if you had not read the earlier books (Dead Man’s Walk & Comanche Moon, which show us the early lives of the Rangers) McMurtry gives us enough back story here to make the reader sympathize with them.

We travel with the Hat Creek outfit from their livery stable in the Texas town of Lonesome Dove through their journey of several thousand miles to Montana, driving over a thousand head of cattle and horses. They encounter natural hazards and the human kind, both of which can be fatal. Along the way we meet new characters whose lives cross those of the main cast, the meetings do not always end pleasantly.

Since I started reading this series with DEAD MAN’S WALK, I was sometimes surprised to see that certain events mentioned in passing in LD did not exactly match the events in the earlier novels. We don’t find characters returning from the dead, but McMurtry seemed to feel it okay to make some changes in how and where certain characters met. Of course, the author went back years later to these characters, but it some cases it seems that he didn't bother checking his own book rather making small changes to events as he pleased. Guess you can do that when you created the characters to begin with. As a long time reader of comics, a continuity glitch or two can't be me too worked up.

It is good to see characters like Deets, Clara, Pea Eye and others who we got to know in the ‘earlier’ books. We learn their fates and see how they have grown from young adults to middle-age. I’m hoping to pick up the last book in the series, which is STREETS OF LAREDO, where we take up the story of an older Captain Call. So far none of McMurtry’s books have disappointed me.

I'm looking forward to reading some of his other western novels, once I take a break with several books of mystery short-stories. I've picked up a few old issues of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies recently and they are next on the agenda.