Lonesome Dove

Note : spoiler alerts

Some time ago HarryC recommended the epic Western novel Lonesome Dove to me.  It took some time but I got it out of the library three weeks ago.

I nearly didn't get started with it.  I was a hundred pages in and it just wasn't grabbing me.  It was on the table to go back to the library, but for some reason I picked it up and tried again.

As I got to know the different characters I became hooked – deeply, emotionally invested in what happened to them.  Not all them – I couldn't really work up much interest in the story arc about sheriff July Johnson and his runaway wife.  But the main characters I cared about deeply.  And, I'm sure like every other woman who has ever read it, I fell head over heels in love with the main character - the 'rake and a rambler' Augustus McCrae.

I'm not going to say too much about the novel because it's worth anyone's time to go and read it.  But I am going to say quite a bit about how, yet again, the inconsistencies in the plot and the mistakes in the text often spoilt my belief in a world that an author has created.

Here's a couple of examples (contains spoilers) :

The disappearing bullet wound

Chapter 94 – Augustus has been shot in his left leg with two arrows.  He also has a wound in his side.  Originally he thought the side wound was from a bullet, then from an arrow which had dropped out.  Then he decides it was a bullet wound after all (page 759).

Chapter 96 – Augustus in in the room at Miles City where his left leg has been amputated.  There is discussion with the doctor about the right leg, but nobody mentions a wound in his side.  Then Call turns up and Augustus tells him he feels ridiculous getting killed by an arrow, when the Indians shot at him with guns fifty times and didn't hit him (page 784).

Left leg / Right leg

Chapter 94 -I understand why the left leg turned septic with two arrow wounds in it, but I don't understand why the unwounded right leg did.  But maybe that's what happens with sepsis, I'm not sure whether that's an inconsistency or not.

The Gender Fluid Horse

Chapter 85 – Dish is riding a horse called Sugar (page 660).  She's referred to as a 'mare', a 'filly', and 'she' throughout the chapter.  So it's obviously a female horse.

Chapter  98.  Dish leaves the ranch in Montana to ride back south on Sugar who is now referred to as 'him'  (page 800).

While I'm having a good old moan, there's a big inconsistency in Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain (from the Border Trilogy).  John Grady Cole is supposed to be completely unaware that the girl he plans to marry is an epileptic.  But when he was searching for her after she left the brothel where he met her, a Mexican who tells him where she has gone refers to her as 'La Epileptica'.  Well I don't speak fluent Spanish like John Grady does, but even I can get the meaning of that.

You may think I'm being ridiculously picky but an author creates a world in your head.  It’s a beguiling world, but fragile as glass. Inconsistencies and errors cause cracks to appear, and bring it home to you very sharply that the world isn't real, it's made up. This is such a blow when I'm totally absorbed in it. 

I don't blame McMurtry or McCarthy, it must be difficult to keep up with the thread of a text which runs to many pages.  Especially Lonesome Dove which was written in 1985 on a typewriter rather than a word processor.  But I do blame the publishers.  It's sloppy editing and sloppy proof reading, and these great novels deserve better.