A review by octavia_cade
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

adventurous sad medium-paced

5.0

I never thought that I'd be giving a western five stars - it's a genre that's never really appealed to me, despite how it's influenced a lot of the science fiction I love - but this was excellent. It's sprawling and enormous, which should be another strike against it as my patience for doorstoppers gets ever thinner, but even with a slow start, the characterisation was so fantastic that I got swept up despite myself. I could take or leave the plot, to be honest, but the characters are so well-formed and distinct that they overshadow everything else. I will say, though, that the characters I'm most likely to remember here are Gus and Clara. I suspect that many readers will feel the same about Call, but while I admire his construction there's more pity there than admiration, and it's harder to remember characters that inspire pity in the way that this one does. I almost feel like I'd be doing him a favour by forgetting him; it's probably what he would want.

Anyway, the book's violent and grim and in places it's just flat-out depressing, but it's leavened by the essential humanism of characters like Gus. I don't know that even with that leavening I'd call it a hopeful read, because it's less about hope than it is about just going on, but maybe that's enough. Against all my expectations, I thoroughly enjoyed it.