Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove, #1)
Author: Larry McMurtry
Rating: â 5/5
Date Read: 2013/09/25
Pages: 960
If youâve ever wondered what book qualifies as the American [b:War and Peace|656|War and Peace|Leo Tolstoy|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1366570580s/656.jpg|4912783], well, Lonesome Dove is certainly a contender. Iâm not just saying that because both books are quite long, or because theyâre both historical fiction*. Lonesome Dove deals with fundamental American mythology: cowboys and Indians, civilization and the frontier, good and evil. Not that I used the word âandâ instead of saying âvs,â because McMurtry is one hell of a storyteller, and he wrote a nuanced book thatâs not as black and white as your typical western.
Lonesome Dove became a favorite almost the minute I started reading it, and itâs hard for me to articulate whatâs so ephemerally affecting about my favorite books. So, since I can already tell that this review is going to be rambling, Iâm going to take a moment to pontificate about the sinusoidal cultural impact of the western. My dad, a baby boomer, grew up watching westerns on weekend television and playing cowboys and indians. As a kid, I never really got the appeal. I was lucky enough to grow up with the new golden age of Disney and great shows on Nickelodeon, but kidsâ media didnât really deal with Western themes. We had Back to the Future III, Maverick, and Wild Wild West, but these films werenât particularly good and didnât take the idea of the West seriously. It wasnât until I watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with my dad that I realized that Westerns actually rock.
The West of Lonesome Dove is soul stirring. Endless prairie as far as the eye can see, wild horses, Indians (both hostile and not), bears, rivers, and rattlesnakes. Itâs populated by people that you wonât be able to forget: rakish Augustus, stolid Call, blunt Clara, quiet Newt. Some characters, like Jake Spoon, straddle the line between good and evil. Others, like Blue Duck and Elmira, are just purely evil. As you can tell from the cast of characters (this list isnât exhaustive), the story is sweeping. Luckily, McMurtry (like Tolstoy) does a great job of giving you a sense of who these characters are, so you wonât have trouble keeping track of them.
I canât describe this book except to say that you should absolutely read it. Even if you donât like Westerns. Trust me.
*I hesitate to really say that War and Peace is historical fiction, because Tolstoy definitely thought he was writing a strange hybrid book that contained fictional and veridical sections. He didnât even call it a novel, but Iâm going to call it that, since itâs the word that, while not perfect, is the most appropriate.
