Lonesome Dove

"Lorie, darlin'."

It's hard to pinpoint what makes Lonesome Dove so good. It is extremely well-written and well-plotted, with characters you enjoy spending time with and a wealth of dramatic moments. And yet, none of that explains why it is so good. It's nearly 1,000 pages long and you don't want it to end.

I'm willing to just hold my hands up and accept it; it's just one of those rare stories that seems to transcend its formula through some strange alchemy, like Star Wars or Casablanca. Author Larry McMurtry just takes a Western – if you were to summarize the book to someone, it would just sound like an average Western – and delivers it note-perfect. Every character is vivid and real, and yet each is different from one another. Every show more moment of humour lands. Every death stings. Every plot point stays tight, and every morning when the sun rises over our cowboys on the trail it feels like a new sunrise painted just for us. It is long, this book, and yet it always seems shorter than a song.

What proves its magic is that McMurtry did not intend for it to go like this: he wanted a bleak, hell-and-leather Western version of Dante's Inferno, but ended up – in his own words – with a sort of Western Gone with the Wind. But this tension also saves it from falling into fatal melodrama: McMurtry is consciously avoiding any Gone with the Wind sentimentality, trying to keep it bloody, and it tempers the story with a keen edge. It is a magically-spun web, but a web where you know a spider is lurking, ready to devour any character who makes poor decisions, or who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, or is just someone unfortunate in a cruel world.

The magic is so strong it carries through into the television adaptation from 1989, which is one of the finest adaptations of a novel you could ever hope to see. The CBS mini-series deserves to stand with anything from our current Golden Age of Television. That I was so completely engrossed in this massive novel, despite knowing every beat of the story from the faithful TV adaptation, is testament to its magic. It is a book that makes you remember what a joy and a gift it is to read. It is a book you don't think about, you don't analyse, you just read and soak it in and, like Gus in the town of Lonesome Dove, sit and drink and watch the sun ease out of the day (pg. 6). show less

An extremely enjoyable Western revolving around two former Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who have a ranch together after having pretty much made Southern Texas safe for settling in their younger days. In the 1870s, restless after years of relative peace, they embark on driving an enormous herd of cattle two thousand miles north to Northern Montana where they'd be the first cattlemen to establish operations.

The story is filled to the brim with memorable characters, first just the men of their outfit and the citizens of Lonesome Dove, then the colorful men they hire to help with the drive, then the various people they encounter on their trip. There are many thrilling adventures against people intent on doing them harm and show more against the geography and weather. They meet people needing their help too.

Most of the characters in the book at one point end up at a horse ranch in Nebraska owned by the lost love of Gus's life, Clara. In fact, seeing Clara again is one of Gus's goals in going on the journey. Clara is a terrific, complex character and her family become central to the later part of this epic story.

This is a giant book but reads quickly and provides a tremendous amount of entertainment. It also leaves you with a lot to think about regarding men and wilderness, the call of a good journey, and the role women played in settling the vast open spaces of the American West. show less

I was in college the first time I read Lonesome Dove (just realized that was TWENTY years ago). I was actively attempting to own and read the Pulitzer Prize Fiction winners back then, I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Killer Angels and a few others. I had a blog with a complete list for my Pulitzer Prize challenge, I stopped keeping track around 2011 and in a purge I traded-in/donated several books (that I periodically go looking for on my shelf because I *swear* I own them).

Lonesome Dove is not one that was accidently traded in. It's a book I recommended on my blog any chance I got -- there used to be these weekly...memes? topics?...where someone would host and everyone would post about that show more thing. My perimenopausal brain can't hold on to words these days so I don't remember what they were called, but it was a thing. Everyone would go visit all of the blogs participating and it didn't involve paywalls or silos. It was great, everyone could have their own opinion, no one was cancelled, nuance existed, if you didn't like what someone had to say you just moved on. I miss those innocent days on the internet...but, I digress.

When I saw the surge in popularity of one of my favorite books featuring one of my favorite fictional characters, I thought...maybe it's time to visit with Gus, Clara, Call, Deets, and Newt again? So I used an Audible credit (actually, I think it was free? It was last October...) for the Lee Horsley audiobook edition (a new edition read by Will Patton was published last month) and started listening. Slowly. (In fact, I initially started listening at 0.9x before I finally bumped it up to 1.0x.)

It takes the Hat Creek Cattle Company months to get from Texas to Montana, so it took me months to listen to their story. And given what happens to my favorite character at the end, I was in no rush to live that again. It involves lots of tears, sobs even. After spending so long with a character and experiencing so much loss, damn. This book is brutal yet beautiful, complex, layered.

I've read other books by McMurtry, Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, but I have not re-visited Gus and Call in any other prequels or sequels. I'm afraid they will ruin the perfection that is Lonesome Dove. Plus I didn't love those other books as much as Lonesome Dove so what if the others in the Lonesome Dove world don't live up to my expectations? It would be devastating.

This book is worth the hype. The characters feel alive, like these were real people (they weren't although Gus/Call were inspired by real people). The sense of place is so strong, McMurtry convinced me long ago that I needed to visit Montana (hasn't happened yet, but that's because I hate traveling). If you like the Yellowstone prequel 1883 or enjoyed reading True Grit or News of the World, and you haven't read Lonesome Dove...what are you waiting for? show less

This nearly 950-page Western revolves in large part around two former Texas rangers who for the last 20 years have run a business selling horses and cattle in the tiny Texas town of Lonesome Dove. Then an old friend shows up talking about the wide, unsettled spaces of Montana, and one of them decides to pack up the whole outfit and drive well over a thousand cattle on a journey to Montana, one that everyone, including the people who agree to come with him, seems to think is insane. Other characters also feature prominently, including Lonesome Dove's only prostitute, a young woman who's already led a very painful life and dreams of finding her way to somewhere better.

There's certainly a lot of stuff that happens in this novel: murders, show more kidnapping, horse thieving, hangings, battles, sex, death, you name it. But it still manages to feel sort of quiet and leisurely, and is perhaps more interested in the characters, their lives and histories and personalities and relationships, than anything else. I read it during a sort of half-vacation, during which I had a lot of reading time, and it was just about ideal for that: engrossing enough to comfortably read for long stretches, but, despite a few tense moments, never propulsive enough that I felt bad putting it down when other things demanded my attention.

One thing this book doesn't do, I think, is to either glorify or subvert the mythology of the American frontier, even though it's always lurking there in the background. Rather, we simply see it through the eyes of those living it. The former Rangers tell themselves, and mostly (but perhaps not entirely) seem to believe, that the native populations of the area had to be defeated so that whites could settle it and that's just the way things are, and McMurtry does not step in to yell at them about it. What he does do is to portray a world full of brutal violence that spares absolutely no one and may or may not be leading to anything worthwhile. (Be warned for some scenes of rape and torture. They're not necessarily described in deep, gory detail, but they're very definitely there.) What the reader takes from all of this will depend, I think, on what they bring into it. show less

Every review and recommendation was right - this was an absolutely ethereal read, completely magical. The first 150 pages or so are a bit slow, but that fits the characters and story anyway. Then I was beyond hooked.

McMurtry's writing flows like water. Whether it's describing the landscape, or getting glimpses of character motivations, or heartbreaking tragedy, it's obvious why this novel won the Pulitzer. There is true beauty here in nearly every sentence.

I was practically screaming at the characters sometimes to go against their nature. Stay, be safe. Apologize to the other person. Share your feelings. But they never do - even if they're aware of it, they can't go against who they are. The frontier is almost a character in itself - show more full of untapped potential, but brutally dangerous. Some death scenes were as shocking as any I've ever read before. I'm still thinking about them weeks later.

It's blunt and bleak, but also funny and hopeful. It's one of the best books I've ever read. show less

I sometimes have a habit of reading “appropriate” books while travelling, i.e. reading The Beach while I was in Thailand and reading The Motorcycle Diaries and Long Way Round while I was on a motorbike trip. In April, May and June of this year, as I travelled from my summer in Perth to my new life in London, I had it all mapped out. The bulk of it was a motorcycle roadtrip with my father between Los Angeles and New York, and I was unsure how much reading I’d actually get done, so I aimed high. I planned to read something Victorian while returning to Melbourne for a week to visit friends (check – The Broken Shore), something American and wildernessy while we were camping out in the West – that would be the book I’m reviewing show more now, the western epic Lonesome Dove – maybe read Willa Cather’s Death Comes To The Archbishop by the time we got to New Mexico, start on Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi when we reached the South, Jonathon Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn for the two weeks in New York and maybe Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites for my four-day stopover in Iceland between New York and London.

So much for all that. I started Lonesome Dove in late April in Los Angeles, while I was buying and prepping a pair of motorcycles, and finished it about seven weeks later in June on the flight out of JFK. In my defence it’s a 900-page brick of a novel, but obviously I overestimated how much reading I’d get done amidst the hurly-burly of travel, and also I’m an enormous dork for mapping out my location-specific reading list in the first place.

Anyway. Lonesome Dove is a well-regarded Western, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1985, and was apparently adapted into a very successful TV miniseries – I actually spoiled the fate of a major character while at a newsagency at JFK, leafing through a magazine featuring a retrospective of the miniseries. It follows a group of former Texas Rangers turned horse traders, the Hat Creek livery outfit, living in the tiny town of Lonesome Dove at the edge of the Rio Grande. When a former member of their outfit returns after ten years of wandering with tales of the beautiful, empty grasslands of Montana, just waiting for settlers to come and claim them, the outfit decides to take one last ride, driving a herd of cattle all the way across the plains to Montana.

Lonesome Dove encompasses all of the Western tropes you could ever want: cowboys, cattle drives, outlaws, horse thieves, hangings, whores, Indians, lonely little prairie towns, gambling, whiskey, saloons, sheriffs, deputies, Texas Rangers, Mexican border raids, preachers, riverboats, buffalo hunters, and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting. And because it won the Pulitzer, I was expecting a tone similar to Cormac McCarthy, but Lonesome Dove is surprisingly a much lighter novel than anything like Blood Meridian – in fact, it’s often quite funny. The two main characters are the kind of best friends who’ve been together so long they’re almost like an old married couple, bickering and arguing and making witty comments, and there are some great moments throughout. This, for example, when former comrade Jake Spoon returns to the Hat Creek outfit, on the run from the law in Arkansas because he accidentally killed a dentist:

“Everybody in town liked that dentist.”

“Aw, Jake, that won’t stick,” Augustus said. “Nobody really likes dentists.”

“This one was the mayor,” Jake said.

It reminded me a lot of True Grit (I’ve seen the modern film, but haven’t read the book) and I was surprised to find that True Grit was not also a McMurtry novel – it was written by Charles Portis. But that’s the story I’d compare it to most: mostly fun and amusing, but with some serious moments of sadness. Because about a third of the way into Lonesome Dove the story suddenly becomes quite dark – some awful things happen, and we realise that the West isn’t all riding horses with your buddies and cracking jokes and appreciating the landscape.
And that doesn’t let up; there are some scenes towards the end of the novel that are truly heart-wrenching. But McMurtry’s tone remains the same throughout, switching from humour to sadness without any particular change in the authorial voice: a sort of hardened-yet-optimistic, seen-it-all-before old man of the West; fatalistic, but not in a depressing way. It’s an effective tone, especially when dealing with death – the deaths of many major characters simply occur, often for stupid or coincidental reasons, and the other characters and the reader just have to move on from it. It’s a good reflection of what life is really like: nobody is safe, least of all in the Old West. And despite having a fairly simple writing style, heavily focused on dialogue, McMurtry also creates some beautiful, almost cinematic images, such as when the Hat Creek outfit emerges from a terrifying night stealing cattle in Mexico to arrive at the Rio Grande at sunrise. I was going to quote that passage here, but it simply doesn’t work out of context, because it’s not so much McMurtry’s prose; it’s the story, the whole dark and ominous chapters of dangerous stealth and sudden action that precede it, capped off with the relief of daylight at the American border.

This tone perhaps has its flaws. The novel ends rather abruptly, and just as easily could have ended a hundred pages earlier or a hundred pages later – or a thousand pages later. Lonesome Dove feels less like a strictly structured novel than a 900-page peek into a chapter of a much longer saga. And indeed, there are apparently three other books in the series – a sequel and two prequels. (By the way, don’t read McMurtry’s 2010 introduction included in some versions, because he spoils a major plot point in the sequel, much as Stephen King ruined the ending of The Running Man in the introduction to all of his Bachman books. I don’t understand these people.)

Lonesome Dove was one of those novels I enjoyed quite a bit while I was reading it, but never felt hugely pressed to read when I wasn’t. Hugely enjoyable, but not gripping, yet nonetheless a novel I’m very pleased I read. It’s a great story, and I’ll probably read the others in the series eventually. I am a little surprised that it won the Pulitzer, since it would be (fairly) described as a book you might buy your dad for Father’s Day, but maybe the committee was a bit less snobbish back then. show less

What a phenomenal read, enormous and brilliant, witty and heartbreaking, a mamoth tale that touches the reader's emotions on so many levels. This is a book that honestly did not appeal to me in the slightest but 100 pages in I was hooked, invested, facinated and brought back in time to the Wild West of the 1870s and the adventures of a bunch of unforgettable and unique characters. I can definatley see why this is a Pulitzer Prize Winner.

The story focuses on a the relationship amount a bunch of Texas Rangers and takes the reader on an epic cattle drive from The Rio Grande to the highlands of Montana in the closing years of the Wild West days, A triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was.

I came across this book on a " show more What Should I read next" Podcast by Anne Bogel, It was reviewed on several of her shows as one of those books you just have to read. When I realised that the novel was close to 850 pages and was a Western I put it on the top shelf and decided it could not possibly be worth the time and commitment. However January can be a long month and when my husband was looking for a good book to read and something that would hold his interest I reached for Lomesome Dove and we decided it was to become our January reading challenge and what a remarkable surprise this book turned out to be for both of us.
Western Novels are totally out of my confort zone however I do like a challenge and this book reminded me of [b:The Pillars of the Earth|5043|The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)|Ken Follett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1576956100l/5043._SY75_.jpg|3359698] in the sense that it is an epic monumental novel, with a wonderful sense of time and place, the most amazing and extremely well formed characters that you grow to love and root for and a book that suprises the reader in so many ways.
The prose is simple yet effective, the descriptions of the countryside and are vivid and transporting, uplifting and inspiring. This is a story of heroism, love, honour, loyalty and betrayal.

I gave this one 5 stars because it, educated me, made me laugh out loud, made me fall head over heels in love with Agustas McCrae and I couldn't wait to come home from work every evening to spend time with the boys and gals from Lonesome Dove.

I think there should be a list on goodreads for Books that you would never dream of reading but will end up absolutely loving

I read this in paperback and also purchased an audio copy as well and I can highly recommend the audio as very well paced and narrated. show less