I can't remember what peculiar combination of circumstances led me to go into Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago and pick up a copy of Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove. Sometimes you'll read a reference to something in the paper or on the internet which sticks like a little burr; and then after a time someone else mentions it, and lo and behold you're in a bookshop and there it is.
I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages. Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles. And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil. All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.
McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye. McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women. Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory. And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.
In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.
As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard. And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.
As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.
It was over much, much too soon. All nine-hundred pages of it.
