Should I number these? Or should I put the title of the book under review in there instead? So, The Science Fiction Utensil: Lonesome Dove, rather than The Science Fiction Utensil #2. And yes, I know Lonesome Dove is not science fiction, but I did say I would not be limiting myself to genre, well, to that specific genre. Um, perhaps I should have called this The Genre Utensil…
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985, USA), is, of course, a cowboy novel, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning cowboy novel. It led to three further novels — a sequel and two prequels — and was adapted for television as a mini-series. While I’ve seen a number of western films, including many of the classic ones, I’m not a fan of the western as a literary genre. I’ve read a few, but mainly those from the literary end — Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Woodrell. And, to be honest, they’re unremittingly bleak. Perhaps there’s a western equivalent to fantasy’s grimdark. If there is, those two authors surely qualify.
Which probably explains why I was amused and delighted to discover Lonesome Dove was actually funny. It’s not a comedy by any means, and it does turn pretty dark around a third of the way in. But there’s a level of wit in the book I found completely unexpected. Most of the wit is presented in the person of Gus McCrae, a retired Texas Ranger, who, with Woodrow Call, another retired Texas Ranger, ranches cattle and horses in a small town, called Lonesome Dove, beside the Rio Grande, which forms the border with Mexico. It’s not really a town — it’s a single street of perhaps a dozen buildings. In Europe, it might qualify as a hamlet. Call and McCrae are spending their retirement raiding Mexico for horses and cattle, and then selling them on in the US. When an old friend, also an ex-Texas Ranger, turns up and extols the virtues of Montana, Call decides to found the first cattle ranch in that state. So he and his crew cross over the Rio Grande, steal several thousand head of cattle, and drive them north…
Lonesome Dove is set in the late 1870s, so around 150 years ago, and while the first of its four parts is amusing and perhaps even elegiac, it soon turns as dark as anything by the two writers mentioned above. It’s not just the hardship of the cattle drive, a trip of over 1,500 miles, but there’s also a level of casual brutality on display that says much about the American character. Yes, Lonesome Dove is funny, but it’s also a novel in which a man murders two homesteaders for no reason, hangs their bodies from a tree and sets fire to them. It’s a novel in which a young woman, previously Lonesome Dove’s only sex-worker, is abducted by a brigand, and sold to a group of men who repeatedly rape her. And there are other events and characters just as barbaric.
Set against this is the camaraderie of the cattle drivers, McCrae’s singular worldview (which provides most of the book’s charm and wit), and the stories of those people who are trying to do right, which dip and out of the main narrative.
I had not, to be honest, expected to enjoy Lonesome Dove. And it’s a hefty novel — 843 pages in hardback, although I read the ebook. But I was drawn in by the opening chapters, by the relationship between Call and McCrae, by the well-drawn characters, and by the clever inter-weaving of narratives. It paints a grim portrait of its time and place, in direct counterpoint to a century or so of Hollywood mythologising, as of course so too do writers like McCarthy and Woodrell — and it’s hard not to feel it presents US society as little more than a thin veneer of civilisation over the barbarism of its nineteenth century. (Also there to be witnessed on occasion on social media, and in US politics.) Not that European society is any better, although perhaps it is more a thin veneer of civilisation over nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism. It’s only in the last week or so, for example, that Germany publicly apologised for the massacres it committed in Namibia over one hundred years ago. The UK, as far as I’m aware, has yet to apologise for any of its historical depredations. Nor, indeed, has the US.
It is in the nature of fiction that it sometimes carries the guilt of a people, just as it is in the nature of people to often blithely ignore the presence of that guilt in a fiction. Even cowboy novels are not “just entertainment” — and if you think stories should not be “political” or “message fiction”, you should probably go back to reading children’s picture books. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of Lonesome Dove — I know little about the time and place, and have little interest in learning more —but for all its grimness, and its alleviating wit, it makes a credible, and even-handed, fist of its setting and of the history, both good and bad, which informs it.
Sometimes, it’s better to tackle such subjects head-on. Sometimes, metaphors and transformations, recasting such stories with spaceships and aliens… Sometimes, they just get in the way, and might even confuse the subject so much it could very well be interpreted as its opposite.
Sometimes, perhaps, science fiction is not so very useful, after all.
