![]() McMurtry writes about a world of implacable injustice.Īnd as always, he’s also very gripping. ![]() (This reminds me of quite a few characters in Game of Thrones.) Part of this is skilful character writing another part of it is McMurtry’s dispassionate style, in which he relays the horrible facts of the frontier in unsentimental prose which can make the actions and choices of characters feel as immutable – and as incapable of guilt or responsibility – as a landslide or a flash flood. Yet because we see him as part of his time and place – and because we see so much of the novel through his eyes, and feel his gnawing anxiety about the end of his people and the end of his era – he’s a character you respect, even if you don’t necessarily like him. Buffalo Hump, for instance – apparently a real historical figure – is a chieftan who halfway through the book brutally murders the unarmed parents of one of the main characters during a horrific raid of rape and plunder. McMurtry also manages to make the Indians sympathetic despite often being violent nightmares in human flesh. They’re very different, of course, since they believe they live in a world of spirits and witches and gods and portents, but at the same time some are more dubious about that than others – much like some Texans roll their eyes at the Bible-bashers amongst their number. Coming from a white 20th century Texan that would normally be cause for concern, but McMurtry’s skill with character is such that the “Indians” are as well-rounded, complex and diverse as the Americans. Nor does McMurtry shy away from the fact that his ostensible heroes are meant to be “civilising” the frontier and driving away the “savages” – in fact, Comanche Moon spends quite a lot of time inside the heads of various Native American characters. ![]() Texas itself, now a state of the Union, is portrayed as a dusty backwater – even its capital is a ramshackle frontier town in which the senators spend their days blind drunk in saloons. Despite their nostalgic memories of the good old days in Lonesome Dove, Gus and Call and their comrades are underequipped, undertrained and underpaid, and suffer from a nagging doubt that they really make very little difference in keeping settlers safe from the Comanche. Rangers are of course fabled figures in Wild West mythology, but as I’ve come to expect from McMurtry, he doesn’t romanticise them. (There’s a fourth volume, Streets of Laredo, which takes place after Lonesome Dove and which I haven’t read yet.)Ĭomanche Moon takes place in the 1850s and 1860s, spanning a fair hunk of our heroes’ time at the core of their life as Texas Rangers. Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry (1997) 752 p.Ĭomanche Moon is the final volume McMurtry wrote about Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, but the second chronologically – it slots in between Dead Man’s Walk, when Gus and Call are freshly minted teenage Texas Rangers, and Lonesome Dove, the original Pulitzer Prize winning doorstopper which sees them retired and herding cattle in their fifties.
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