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\u00a9 Pan Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So it\u2019s farewell to the author Larry McMurtry, who passed awa<\/a>y on March 25th<\/sup> at the age of 84.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I wrote on this blog about Mr McMurtry\u2019s most famous opus after I finished reading it early last year. <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The cowboy-herding, dust-churning, all-mooing-and-lowing cattle drive may not be the biggest trope in the western genre.\u00a0 That accolade probably belongs to the High<\/em> Noon<\/em>-style showdown<\/a>.\u00a0 But it\u2019s surely a major one.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Most famously, a cattle drive figured in the classic 1948 Howard Hawks \/ John Wayne western movie Red<\/em> River<\/em> and as late as 1972 Wayne was still herding cattle across the prairies in Mark Rydell\u2019s The<\/em> Cowboys<\/em>.\u00a0 Elsewhere, cattle drives have been the basis for eight seasons of the western TV series Rawhide<\/em> (1959-65), been subjected to revisionism in the raw-edged film The<\/em> Culpepper<\/em> Cattle<\/em> Co<\/em> (1972), been lovingly parodied in the Billy Crystal comedy City<\/em> Slickers<\/em> (1991) and even been reimagined in a bucolic British setting in Richard Eyre\u2019s Singleton\u2019s<\/em> Pluck<\/em> (1984).\u00a0 That last movie, written by Brian Glover and starring Ian Holm, told the tale of a poultry farmer who\u2019s forced by a transport workers\u2019 strike to walk his thousands of geese to market, all the way from Norfolk to London.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, the above cattle drives last within the timeframes of films or TV episodes and take up no more than a couple of hours of your time.\u00a0 By the time you get through the 843 pages of Larry McMurtry\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em> (1985), you almost feel you\u2019ve taken part in a cattle drive.\u00a0 I started reading it at the beginning of 2020 and by the time I\u2019d finished it the most of three weeks later, I felt mentally as saddle-sore as its characters felt physically after riding from the parched plains of southern Texas to the wintry uplands of Montana.\u00a0 Though, like those characters when they arrived in Montana, the feeling was accompanied by a buzz of fulfilment and satisfaction too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To be fair, the cattle drive in Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em> doesn\u2019t take all of 843 pages.\u00a0 There\u2019s a leisurely preamble whereby McMurtry sets up his characters and prepares them, and the reader, for the odyssey ahead.\u00a0 The characters belong to the Hat Creek Cattle Company, based at the south Texan town of the title, Lonesome Dove.\u00a0 The company\u2019s proprietors are two former Texas Rangers, the garrulous, witty, warm-hearted and philosophical Augustus \u2018Gus\u2019 McCrae and the stiff, unsociable, emotionally repressed and work-driven W. F. Call.\u00a0 Gus reminds Call early on: \u201cYou was born in Scotland\u2026\u00a0 I know they brought you over when you was still draggin\u2019 on the tit, but that don\u2019t make you no less a Scot.\u201d\u00a0 Obviously, Call never recovered from his early exposure to Calvinism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One day, a familiar face appears on their property.\u00a0 This is Jake Spoon, another ex-ranger and an old friend of theirs but someone who makes a living by gambling rather than cattle-dealing.\u00a0 It transpires that the charming but unprincipled and fickle Jake is on the run because he accidentally killed a man after a card game turned ugly in the Arkansas town of Fort Smith.\u00a0 The victim managed to be the town\u2019s dentist, and the town\u2019s mayor, and<\/em> the brother of the town\u2019s sheriff, July Johnson.\u00a0 Also, Jake brings with him stories about the opportunities offered by the newly opened-up, barely explored and still unpopulated territory of Montana.\u00a0 This prompts Call to gather together the company\u2019s livestock, employees and physical possessions, such as they are, and abandon Lonesome Dove and embark on an epic journey north.\u00a0 The hope is that their business will prosper on Montana\u2019s seemingly limitless grazing lands.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To bolster their supplies of cattle and horses before they leave, Call and Gus embark on a raid across the border and steal some herds from a wealthy Mexican rancher called Pedro Flores.\u00a0 They do this without any moral qualms, since the unscrupulous Flores does the same thing regularly in the other direction, from Mexico into Texas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also, they increase their crew by hiring for the drive a motley collection of cowpokes, misfits and youngsters.\u00a0 Jake tags along too, taking with him a young prostitute called Lorena from Lonesome Dove\u2019s saloon, who\u2019s fallen, temporarily at least, for his oily charms.\u00a0 But the workshy Jake keeps his distance from the Hat Creek gang and sets up a private camp for himself and Lorena.\u00a0 They quickly lose their enthusiasm for camping and the outdoors as it becomes apparent that pampered, saloon-loving cardsharp Jake is no Bear Grylls.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And so our heroes hit the trail.\u00a0 There follow hundreds of pages featuring sandstorms, thunderstorms, blizzards, hazardous river crossings, run-ins with bad \u2019uns and encounters with unfriendly wildlife such as locusts, snakes and bears.\u00a0 Other characters appear, including Sheriff July Johnson and his hapless deputy Roscoe, rival cattle baron Mr Wilbarger, murderous renegade Indian Blue Duck, the no-better trio of white outlaws the Suggs Brother, and feisty Clara Allen, once courted in her youth by both Gus and Jake.\u00a0 Clara now runs a horse ranch in Nebraska and Gus, still carrying a torch for her, intends to visit her during the drive. \u00a0Larry McMurtry sub-plots furiously, with characters constantly hiving off from the drive or running into it.\u00a0 His characters encounter one another, part company with one another, are reunited with one another and, occasionally, kill one another.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One thing that\u2019s striking about Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em> is the underlying randomness and arbitrariness of it all.\u00a0 Big events happen but often the reasons causing them to happen are fleeting whims, snap decisions or simple happenstance.\u00a0 The pragmatic and unimaginative Call isn\u2019t normally taken in by Jake\u2019s bullshit but, somehow, he falls for his tales about Montana, with the result that the Hat Creek Cattle Company uproots itself and goes.\u00a0 The bemused Gus tells him, \u201cI hope it makes you happy\u2026\u00a0 Driving these skinny cattle all that way is a funny way to maintain an interest in life, if you ask me.\u201d\u00a0 Elsewhere, July Johnson didn\u2019t particularly like his dead dentist \/ mayor brother (\u201cOnce when he had pulled a bad tooth of July\u2019s he had charged the full fee\u201d) and regards his death as an accident, but is bullied into going after Jake by his widowed sister-in-law.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What sets all these things in motion is the fact that in the Fort Smith saloon where Jake got himself into trouble, someone unwisely left a loaded shotgun propped against the wrong part of the wall.\u00a0 If this was how the West was won, Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em> suggests, it was by accident rather than design.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Similarly, the subplots often don\u2019t resolve themselves in the way you expect, or don\u2019t resolve themselves at all.\u00a0 The long-awaited showdown between Jake and July, for example, never happens because both characters get distracted by other events \u2013 Jake falling in with the Suggs brothers and soon being party to worse things than the accidental shooting of a dentist, and July learning that his dissatisfied wife has taken advantage of his absence to run away from Fort Smith and setting off in pursuit of her instead.\u00a0 And the expected subplot whereby the vengeful Pedro Flores pursues the Hat Creek Cattle Company to get his animals back never materialises for, soon afterwards, Call and Gus receive word that Flores has suddenly died.\u00a0 (\u201cI never expected that\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI never either, but then I don\u2019t know why not.\u00a0 Mexicans don\u2019t have no special dispensation.\u00a0 They die like the rest of us.\u201d)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meanwhile, the mid-point of the book is shocking for how the plot-threads of three characters, in whom the reader has invested a lot of time and sympathy, are abruptly terminated.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to think McMurtry did this for dramatic effect, though I suspect he just realised his plotting was becoming too tangled and he needed to prune it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9Picador <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Talking of being shocking, there are times, especially when Blue Duck and the Suggs Brothers are centre-stage, when Lonesome Dov<\/em>e veers off into the gruelling, blood-soaked territory inhabited by another famous western novel that appeared in 1985, Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Blood Meridian<\/em>.\u00a0 However, despite its occasional darkness, Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em> contains much more humanity, warmth and optimism than McCarthy\u2019s nihilistic gorefest \/ prose-poem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It also isn\u2019t afraid to evoke the conventions that were staples of the westerns of yore and I wonder how a young 21st<\/sup> century readership would react to some of those conventions today.\u00a0 The western was traditionally a genre where \u2018a man\u2019s gotta do what a man\u2019s gotta do<\/a>\u2019 and it paid little attention to feminist sensibilities.\u00a0 Accordingly, some may find the character of Lorena problematic, since she starts the novel as a hard-assed grifter but steadily becomes more dependent on the men around her.\u00a0 First, she falls for Jake, and then she falls for Gus, who rescues her after she\u2019s been abducted by Blue Duck.\u00a0 That said, the rancher Clara Allen is one of the toughest and wisest characters in the book.\u00a0 Near the end, she gets a chance to speak her mind to Call, somebody she\u2019s always had a low opinion of: \u201cYou men and your promises: they\u2019re just excuses to do what you plan to do anyway, which is leave.\u00a0 You think you\u2019ve always done right \u2013 that\u2019s your ugly pride, Mr Call\u2026\u00a0 You\u2019re a vain coward, for all your fighting.\u00a0 I despised you then for what you were, and I despise you now, for what you\u2019re becoming.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another old Western convention that\u2019s less palatable nowadays is that of having native Americans as the bad guys.\u00a0 And in Lonesome<\/em> Dove<\/em>, Blue Duck and his henchmen are particularly and memorably vile.\u00a0 But in McMurtry\u2019s defence, I\u2019d argue that more often the natives featured in the novel are impoverished, pitiful and dispossessed due to the remorseless encroachment of the White Man.\u00a0 At one point, for instance, Call donates a few of the company\u2019s steers to a band of starving Wichita tribespeople.\u00a0 It\u2019s insinuated that if people are treated cruelly, some at least will come to behave cruelly too.\u00a0 Interestingly, Clara shows no concern about a Sioux chief called Red Cloud who\u2019s on the warpath in her neighbourhood because, she explains to July, her late husband behaved honourably to Red Cloud and his people once.\u00a0 \u201cI know Red Cloud\u2026\u00a0 Bob was good to him.\u00a0 They lived on our horses that hard winter we had four years ago \u2013 they couldn\u2019t find buffalo\u2026\u00a0 Bob treated them fair and we\u2019ve never had to fear them.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also, though Call and Gus\u2019s earlier line of work as rangers frequently involved them killing native Americans who violently objected to the US government\u2019s policies towards them, Gus at least questions the wisdom of what they did.\u00a0 This is especially so now that the White Man\u2019s \u2018civilisation\u2019 \u2013 as epitomised by \u2018the bankers\u2019 \u2013 is moving in and taking over.\u00a0 \u201cDoes it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake\u2026?\u201d he asks Call.\u00a0 \u201cMe and you done our work too well.\u00a0 We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Later, he speculates that a time will come when the bankers will need to kill the likes of him off too.\u00a0 Which, in a roundabout way, makes this densely plotted and ruggedly entertaining novel a forerunner to David Mackenzie\u2019s excellent modern-day western movie about cowboys versus bankers, 2016\u2019s Hell or High Water<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/CM-BM.jpg\")
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