Lonesome Dove
A Review
From: @this_is_lit_literally
“I’ll die someplace, and so will you — it might not be no better place than Lonesome Dove.” — Captain Call
I’m unsure if everyone who has ever read this book hails it as a masterpiece. It sure seems like it. What I know for sure is I’m one of them now.
Lonesome Dove is one of those novels that hardly ever come along and remind us why we started reading fiction in the first place. And I want to stress that it was “in the first place”, because before we found some transcendental significance to reading, we fell in love with great stories, with compelling enough plots and characters that stuck with us potentially forever. This is why we love Huckleberry Finn, It’s why we love The Odyssey, and The Three Musketeers, and even why some stories in the Bible are unforgettable. This is not to say that these stories are mundane or without gravity. These are stories that have become a source of multiple learnings for people of all ages and levels of instruction. They are the ones we call “universal”.
So what makes a story about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana universal?
For one, the notion that most of life is about going from point A to point B and that when thought through both A and B are as random and insignificant as any. It would explain why stories of great voyages are so appealing, like The Lord of the Rings, Heart of Darkness, or The Odyssey. In fact, McMurtry’s Montana is not far from Homer’s Ithaca (my humble opinion). Although plot-driven storytelling has fallen out of favor in recent years, the amount of readers it can still draw by the rediscovery of classic works of fiction, speaks to how all-embracing it is.
“It’s funny, leaving a place, ain’t it?” he said. “You never do know when you’ll get back.” — Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove narrates the epic of a cattle drive in the soon-to-be-gone American frontier. Throughout this already ambitious enterprise, subplots spring out of it that fuel the narrative and keep the reader questioning the characters’ motivations, the outcome of individual events, and the entire idea of the frontier. And even though McMurtry doesn’t dwell on some of the most gruesome aspects of the story, that expose the inherent violence of the Western genre, he doesn’t shy away from big philosophical ideas. Particularly via the two colliding philosophies of the novel, embodied by the two main characters, the Stoic Captain Call, and the Epicurean Gus McRae.
The whole ensemble of characters is the standout feature of the novel. “The Hat Creek Outfit”, led by the Captain and Gus is a group of ex-rangers and ne’er-do-wells turned cowboys that encompass most of the prevailing concerns of men and women in the West (at least from the perspective we get of writers of the genre). From these characters' doings and mishaps, we get to explore queries of unrequited love, fatherhood, work ethic, racism, violence and several close-hitting traits with which anyone could draw similarities and have rapport.
Going back to the sort of story that I fell in love with “In the first place”, Lonesome Dove is a great example of a novel that locates the standing of fiction in the world and why it’s always mattered (perhaps now more than ever). It’s the sort of epic that allows us to ask the big questions in life. Most of the time these questions don’t even have an answer or a logical explanation, and it is precisely because of that, that they matter the most. Cliched as it may be, it is a somewhat hard truth that points A or B mean nothing by themselves. And the meaning you draw along the way depends entirely on your experience. Should you make the journey as stoically as Captain Call or as pleasure-seeking as Gus, is up to you to decide. In the end, as the Captain says “I’ll die someplace, and so will you — it might not be no better place than Lonesome Dove.”
