Lonesome Dove - book review

The Bonnie Lea Book Club met on a stormy July night to review Larry McMurty‘s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Lonesome Dove. The energy in the room reflected the breadth and depth of this great work of literature: robust and insightful.

Tyler Sheridan, the creative force behind Yellowstone and Landman and other successful westerns has read Lonesome Dove some 30 to 40 times. It is Stephen King‘s favorite book. It is a masterpiece which reveals the power of storytelling, where the characters share experiences and understanding with the reader, revealing the complexities of our human experience.  If you want to ride along with people who lived and died before our grandparents were born, read this. 

Lonesome Dove hardcover

The story begins in a south Texas border town somewhere near today’s modern day Laredo, around 1870. The West was untamed. The story chronicles a cattle drive from the hardscrabble town of Lonesome Dove all the way to Montana.  Beyond the plot, this is a story of love and grit, of human suffering, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s about a place in time.  To read it well is to go back in time.

After a briefly chaotic start - we were all eager to get going - Chuck, who recommended the book and led our discussion, posed the question, ‘Of all the characters, which one would you like to be?’  Initial answers chose one of the two primary protagonists, Augustus, McRae, and Captain Woodrow Call, partners of the Hat Creek Livery company, and co-protagonists in the novel..  Joel and Geoff liked Gus, the white night, cool in battle, a day drinking hopeless romantic.  His opposite, Captain Call was a hardworking stoic, diligent, solid, reliable, a natural leader that men wanted to follow.  Around these two central characters, the company attracted many other diverse characters into their sphere.

Jeff liked the teen wrangler Newt, driven to learn, terrified to fail, to become a man from a fatherless orphan.  Not until the end of the book does Call suggest paternity when he gives Newt his father’s gold watch, and his horse, Hell Bitch.

Bill suggested that the West was another primary character, as mercurial as any human character, often predictably hard, but lovely. Gus and Call knew the West was pure and wild, both drawn to embark on an adventure to untamed land, a decade before being spoiled by rail lines and other civilizational incursions from the east.

In this West, there was no rule of law; only the moral code of the players. Each had to live by their own rules. The absence of societal structure revealed what Bill summarized, "where the land neither rewards virtue nor punishes vice.”  The bravest of the brave were killed, often overwhelmed by circumstances and darker forces they could neither control nor avoid

The sign for Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium provided early foreshadowing of the centripetal force of these two alpha protagonists, including additional primary characters Deets and Pea Eye, scout and senior wrangler, and beyond them, the sign’s last line: Uva uvam vivendo varia fit, roughly translated as "A grape changes color by living with other grapes". While Gus didn’t actually know the meaning of the phrase, it is an apt variation of an older Roman proverb expressing the idea that we are shaped and influenced by the company we keep.  The guys - and the girl - along the ride to Montana created a rich world of its own, within land bound by rivers, peppered by hail, ripped apart by central plains storms, and intersected by many other characters along the way. 

McMurty uses foreshadowing frequently, as a second read makes clear. Gus predicted early in the story that he would not get out of this alive, and Jake Spoon, a despicable unreliable, former Texas Ranger predicted that he would die at the end of a rope. Less obvious foreshadowing lurks throughout.

All the best developed characters reflect the complexities of real humans: their acceptance of the inevitability of circumstances, facing down personal demons, or not, second guessing decisions and actions, and the little victories that keep our heads above water amidst a raging storm.  

Bill argued provocatively that the character Clara, Gus’s old flame, was ‘artificial’; but several of us pushed back. Doug noted that she was wily, and strong enough to reject Gus before the story began; she had a durable moral compass to “stand by her man“, her dying husband.  Her comeuppance to Captain Call was epic: “I despised you then, and I despise you now for what you’re doing”.  In the emergent West not just the men were tough as nails.  All that said, she did fit neatly, like a critical jigsaw piece, into the whirlwind of the story. 

Antagonists, including Comanchero Blue Duck, the Kiowas, the Suggs Brothers, Monkey John and Dog Face, revealed the darkest side of humanity.  These characters and themes prompted another question, that being, could Lonesome Dove win the Pulitzer Prize today?  We generally agreed it could not. This book is too raw and unfiltered to fit today’s popular sensibilities. Criticisms today include that the book supports stereotypes on Native Americans, Black Americans, and women.  Such a story of grit and human complexities absent today’s social shrouds does reveal truths that are inconvenient for modern day discussion.  “Man’s inhumanity to man” has been chronicled in great literature since Homer’s The Iliad was put to paper.  This great novel simply doesn’t fit today’s popular binary simplicity.

Some characters transit the spectrum of good to evil; and evil to good. None more hauntingly than Lorena, raised in Georgia, orphaned at 12 as her family moved west, so beautiful, used and abused along her journey, landing at the Dry Bean Saloon near the Hat Creek outfit in Lonesome Dove.  Hardened but not strong, fully broken after unimaginable abuse at the hands of Blue Duck, we learned that she emerges OK in McMurty’s sequel.  

Sheriff July Johnson was the archetypal weak man in hard country.  You had to empathize, a little. His wife Ellie, was the archetypal selfish bad girl.

Beyond the over 100 named characters, and 20+ fully developed, the theme of death permeated the story.  While some deaths were fully justifiable, even satisfactory, such as hanging the Suggs brothers, along with Jake Spoon, others were emotional.  Rivers were recognized borders, delineating country, as few cattlemen, or anyone else for that matter, could swim.  The death of Sean O’Brien, the young Irish bard, beset by water moccasins on the Nueces River, was heartrending. It’s not that he fell from his horse in the water, but that his horse awoke an angry brood of vipers.

The worst death had to be Deets, the competent and reliable black scout who died at the hands of a young Comanchero, upon a gesture of kindness within a place of deep family suffering.  Tears, not just by the characters. 

“That’s the wild for you; it’s got its dangerous which is part of the beauty”. The fight scene between a grizzly bear and the big old Texas Longhorn rivals any front row seat at the ring. 

Why did Augustus agree to go to Montana? Was it just a booty call (to reconnect with Clara)?  The answer was elusive until near the end of the story while Gus was scouting after Deets’ death, when he confided in Newt. “This is the place.“   Clearly, the mountains and big sky of Montana held a beauty far beyond the south Texas of dry wells, Comancheros, and Mexican banditos. 

This early untamed West bespeaks the expression that ‘hard times make hard men, hard men make easier times, and easier times make soft men’; to wit, the bar in San Antonio, where aging Texas Rangers Gus and Call encounter a disrespectful young bartender.   In another in-town scene, Call reveals a viciousness readers had not seen, such that Gus had to rope him and extract him with his horse from murdering an army scout.  On Main Street. Hard times make hard men.  Does a spectrum of good and evil lurk in us all?

The length (850 pages) of this novel makes it no easy read. It is difficult today to set time aside in our over-scheduled world.   And yet, endured immersion into a great story returns a sense of place, of reality, which brief, casual attendance cannot.  Don’t binge a Netflix series: take time to savor the landscape, to shed tears for lost friends, to experience a place in time and a time in place that we dream of.  The effort is well worth it.  When Bill's wife, Ellen read this on Bill’s enthusiastic endorsement, she commented it was ‘kind of rough, but she felt for all the characters’. Amen.  Get to know them.  They reveal much about America today, under this veneer of comfort.  

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For our next book we took pitches for Napoleon, The Odyssey, London Falling, and Gad Saad’s book, Suicidal Empathy, which we chose.  As a sidebar, Thomas Sowell’s Cultures and Migrations offers an excellent empirical study on the topic, and is recommended for deeper evidence based understanding of such a complex, polemic subject.  Ask for my copy.