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The urge to move comes as natural to McCrae and Call as the need to hang a thief. Yet they seem chained to an emotionally dead past. "The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom," said D.H. Lawrence. This includes Lorena, the local whore with the 14-karat ventricles, who joins the drive north because she has never lived any place cool. She also motivates much of the action when kidnaped by Blue Duck, an Indian whose specialty is killing settlers and selling their horses and children. Lonesome Dove has the highest mortality rate of any novel in recent memory. Characters are shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, trampled, struck by snakes and lightning. "Gravediggers could make a fortune in these parts" is the sort of manly banter encountered on every other page. When the guys get dreamy, it is for Lorena or a horse.
But smile when you say cliche. McMurtry is a storyteller who works hard to satisfy his audience's yearning for the familiar. What, after all, are legends made of? The secret of his success is embellishment, the odd detail or colorful phrase that keeps the tale from slipping into a rut. During a thunderstorm, a cowboy is amazed to see little blue balls of electricity rolling on the horns of cattle. "You stayed gone a while" is poetry compared with "Long time, no see."
McMurtry also knows a thing or two about ambivalence. Though far from Freud's Vienna, McCrae and Call intuitively understand the meaning of Civilization and Its Discontents: "Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with," says McCrae. Call silently disagrees: "Nobody in their right mind would want the Indians back, or the bandits either. Whether Gus had ever been in his right mind was an open question."
Lonesome Dove is not the place to ask it. McMurtry's lip service to psychological conflict is lost to his outsize talent for descriptive narrative. Filmmakers should have no trouble finding visual thrills. The standard stream crossing is perked up by an attack of water moccasins; there is a choice between a dandy sandstorm and a typhoon of grasshoppers; Blue Duck is a menacing piece of work with his necklace of amputated fingers; a bear fights a bull to a draw; and a dead hero is packed in salt and carted more than a thousand ceremonious miles to his grave. There are also long, featureless stretches that add up to the reading equivalent of driving across Texas. But McMurtry knows exactly what he is doing in this sentimental epic. He is an uncommonly shrewd judge of book flesh.