Comanche Moon

Rating:
Summary: Great story - poor research
Review: Once again, McMurtry is not to be outdone with his representation of the Wild, Wild West. This story is at times implausible, but still a fascinating story. One major complaint is that his story lines do not correlate with other novels. There are many details described in this story that contradict details described in Lonsome Dove. It is frustrating that an author that takes the time to create characters we grow to love, would not take the time to make certain his story line is correct. Still a great read, and a strong recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: Sad end to a great saga
Review: Like most reviews, I liked the book and was sad the great Gus and Call saga had finally come to an end. Of the four books, this ties with Dead Man's Walk. The best, by far, is Lonesome Dove and then Streets of Laredo. Because of the following these books have generated, I hope McMurtry writes another novel about one of the Lonesome Dove characters.

Rating:
Summary: McMurty goes slumming; drops Gus and Call into a comic book.
Review: When Larry McMurty is on, he's really on (witness Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo), but when he's off -- ugh. Comanche Moon is way off. The characters are caricatures, the situations are implausible, the writing is weak and unconvincing. The only possible silver lining: Maybe McMurty will feel a need to redeem himself and invest some effort in a more worthy segment of the series for the readers he cheats with a very dim Moon.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent read for Lonesome Dove fans.
Review: Comanche Moon fills in many gaps in the Lonesome Dove saga. It doesn't always jibe with the other stories in the series, but it stands by itself as an excellent novel by McMurtry. McMurtry does get long winded with his explanation of the relationship between Call and Maggie. The story could have been sped up considerably and 100 pages (it felt like 100)could have been cut if he hadn't dwelled so much on their doomed (and dull) relationship. The most interesting character was Skull. The best part of the book concerns Skull's battle of wills with Ahumando. Overall the book was excellent, but not as good as Lonesome Dove or Streets of Larado.

Rating:
Summary: Gutsy Good Writing
Review: Western novels haven't exactly been a staple of my reading diet but now I've realized how much fun I've been missing. It is true that much of this praise is attributable to the ability of writer Larry McMurtry to evoke a time and a place, but the fascination for the mythical qualities of the Old West is one of the most enduring pleasures in a contemporary period of digital slings and arrows, electronic noise, and palaverous tedium.

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call are brought to life in this culminating novel of McMurtry's Texas Ranger series with a style that not only competes with the Big Screen but usually surpasses it. You get the feeling that you know these fellows from personal experience, and you discover them at a depth which is virtually impossible in the flat though flamboyant medium of film. The garrulous and wayward Gus McCrae is the perfect partner for the stolid and taciturn Woodrow F. Call. There's an abundance of colorful characters who ride the American Southwest with Call and McCrae, each with a distinctive personality, with weaknesses and strengths in such a baffling, unpredictable mix that you must keep following along through the more than 800 pages of this exciting yarn. McMurtry knows what people are made from and if this story reeks a little of saddle soap and gun oil, it's more because the times were particularly hard on the women who ventured westward in the 1800s than from any intent to direct this novel toward male readers. Of course, much that happens to these characters is unremittingly brutal. There are no noble savages, just as there are no perfect cowboy heroes. Women are kidnapped and raped, men are scalped, and children are murdered in this tale of the last days of the Indian wars. The Comanche tortures are fiendish, the white man's cruelty and narrow-mindedness is endemic, and the trail is long, dusty, dry and painful at every turn. But the excitement is at a high pitch all the way to the end. What else could make me, normally a reader of dr! y and dusty tomes, of literature with a capital "L", sprint through so many pages of a cowboy novel?

Rating:
Summary: I wish the story would never end.....
Review: I can't get enough of August and Woodrow...and I love McMurtry's books, each and every one...Of course, Lonesome Dove ranks right up there with GWTW.....

Rating:
Summary: ANOTHER CLASSIC!!
Review: NO ONE makes you feel as much a part of the story as larry mcmurtry. when i put one of his books down i generally have to get a glass of water to get the dust out. I enjoyed comanche moon, but felt it just left me hanging, which would be fine, except that i already read the other 3 parts to the series. as i was reading comanche i wondered how the book would have been if read in sequencial order, not knowing the future. GUS AND CALL are probably the two best characters in american fiction, and in comanche moon you can find several reasons not to like CALL. read this if you have read lonesome dove or plan to read it. alone, i am not sure.

Rating:
Summary: Wish the ending was as good as the remainder of the book
Review: The author does it again in hooking the reader with memorable characters. After reading Lonesome Dove, I was certain that I would never encounter a more memorable and evil character than Blue Duck. MrMurtry has created, if possible, a more soulless villian in Ahumado. In addition, the characters of Skull and his wife will also live on in reader's memories long after the book is completed. The perspective of the settlement of Texas from a Comanche viewpoint is as vivid as is the terror of their raids. My greatest criticism is that it seemed as if the author simply grew tired of the story coming around the home turn. I wish he had permitted Call and McRae to confront the Black Vaqeuro; Ahumado, as well as reuniting the two Rangers with Skull. In fact, the Skull characters would be a great source of a brand new series!

In spite of an ending which is as unevental as the land they are travelling on by foot, anyone who enjoyed Lonesome Dove should get their hands on this book.

Rating:
Summary: Typos and mental lapses in the Old West
Review: It sure seemed to me as if McMurtry and Simon & Schuster were merely completing some sort of contractual obligation to each other and emotional obligation to fans of the Lonesome Dove series with the publication of Comanche Moon.

Yeah, I enjoyed the book for 400-500 pages, before it degenerated into a progressively typo-ridden, rambling series of brief, occasionally poignant but mainly disconnected and even trite series of vignettes attempting to sum up the lives of the various characters.

Others have described the incredibly sloppy proofreading job on this book, involving typographical errors and repeated portions of dialogue. What a mess! What lack of respect for the reading public! And the editors failed to correct the author's numerous mental lapses, among them:

* Ranger Lee Hitch is shaggy-haired and Stove Jones is bald, but several pages later, when they line up for haircuts in the town of Lonesome Dove, Lee Hitch is bald and Stove Jones is shaggy-haired.

* Inez Scull complains that she dropped her buggy whip, then just a few paragraphs later, she begins to beat Gus with her buggy whip.

* Call grows bored with the rangers' conversation and walks away, then somehow contributes a comment to the same conversation.

Have I missed anything?

I greatly enjoyed the Lonesome Dove series, but would rank this book fourth in quality.

Rating:
Summary: Testimonial to the Tetralogy
Review: Comanche Moon is the last of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy revered as the Great American Western epic. Were I to write as well as McMurtry, I would have preferred his grand characters, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, to have been literary guides through the true stories of of the Meir, Santa Fe, and Ross Expeditions, Quanah and Cynthia Ann Parker, Bigfoot Wallace, Buffalo Hump and the Comanche Retaliatory Raids after the Council House Massacre, and Billy Dixon's seven-eighths mile shot of the medicine man at Adobe Walls, rather than through literary license to have taken the actions and done the deeds themselves. I would have written more of Charles Goodnight, Oliver Loving, One Arm Bill Wilson, Bose Ikard, Captain Richard King and even John Wesley Hardin, and included the story of Col. Ranald Mackenzie's tactical decision to kill the Comanches' horses in the Palo Duro Canyon, instead of confronting a larger force of hostile Indians with a smaller force of cavalry. That victory ultimately subdued the Comanche, said to have been the greatest light cavalry force in the world. Introduced in Comanche Moon, is a new character in the saga, Captain Inish Scull of Boston. I had first hoped that Captain Jack Hays, great Ranger, Indian fighter, later founder of Oakland, California and philanthropist to California colleges, would be the inspiration for Captain Scull. That notion was quashed when the author introduced Scull's wife Inez/Dolly. Jack Hays would not have suffered such. The true stories themselves make splendid literature and need not be altered to be riveting and entertaining. But I am not such a writer as he, and it is his story.

McMurtry claims to be no student of Texas history and finds flaw in Walter Prescott Webb's The Texas Rangers (1935) for "inordinate admiration" [McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave (1968)]; yet he, like Webb, writes as a "symbolic frontiersman". His great Ranger captains must be composites of Captain Jack Hays, Captain Rip Ford, Captain L. H. McNelly, and Ranger scout Charles Goodnight, and his stories amalgams of theirs. His eye for the land captures the mystery and intrigue of the vastness and openness of the Llano Estacado. Its beauty, its starkness, its cultures, creatures and people, its geography, topography, archaeology and history all provide both setting, theme and metaphor. McMurtry writes well of a place he knows well, for as a boy he summered "above/on" the Caprock, at the McMurtry Reunions at Saints' Roost. (Neither preposition has ever seemed right, neither conveying what the Caprock meant to the shape of the lives of the people who lived there. Best said would be "of" as in "he was of the Caprock".)

Comanche Moon spends much time both in Austin and of the Caprock. McMurtry's descriptions fit my memories and my imaginations of what the country must have been like during the 100 years removed from my lifetime. One can still see in Austin the lone northeast sally port of what was to have been Texas Military Institute and know exactly the author's inspiration for the Sculls' castle-like mansion above Shoal Creek, with its view of the Governor's Mansion. Today's traveler across the Texas Panhandle can still see the mirages shimmering in the distance and dust devils and blizzards cutting across the flat plains. After traveling miles in the vastness and flatness of the treeless llano from Post, Texas, up State Highway 207 on the way to the Canadian River, stomach leaps to throat as the Grand Canyon-like beauty of Palo Duro Canyon reveals itself. Opening itself to the traveler slowly at first, the country gives subtle clue that something is changing. Then all of a sudden its proportions hammer, as one finally comes close enough to its sides to see its bottom and its drama. Looking down from its south rim, one can see the Canyon's juniper cedar filled floor and imagine the teepees of the Quahadi or Penateka Comanches along the banks of the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River that carved the chasm.

McMurtry once claimed to be novelist, "unaccustomed to the strain of prolonged thought" of non-fiction, believing his voice in novel more stentorian and full and with greater range than in essay. [In a Narrow Grave (1968), pp. 138-39, 142] While disclaiming being any thing other than a writer of fiction, it is obvious that McMurtry has read Webb, Bedichek, Dobie, Haley, Graves and Fehrenbach. While not a writer at all, I am glad to say that I have read McMurtry, and Comanche Moon. To my eye and ear it is second only to Lonesome Dove itself. One sees in it the beginning McRae's great dialog which made the first 100 pages of Lonesome Dove worth reading over and over. Through it, one realizes that the western genre has in the past been more about gunfighters than cowboys. McMurtry's Texas Rangers are really not either. Today we see examples of why soldiers should not be policemen, and why policemen should not be organized as paramilitary groups. Unique times and territory dictated that the Rangers be neither, but both. They ranged. And it is the choice of the Rangers that sets the tetralogy apart and allows its epic status. Because I grew up in the Panhandle whose Anglican genesis is yet not so removed from the present, unlike others of my age from other parts of the state, I missed its settlement by only one wide generation and perhaps another not so wide. For this reason, perhaps, the myth and the reality of the Plainsman are to me but one. I never wrestled with any disparity between the sociology and the mythology of the cowboy as McMurtry apparently did. [In a Narrow Grave (1968)]

Although a worthy tome, its publisher missed the mark by waiting until November for its release, more mindful of Christmas sales than of its title and theme. It should have been released in early October, allowing the reader to spend late nights and early mornings reading as the big full October Moon traveled across the night sky. The Comanche Moon, the moon under which young Comanche warriors went down the Comanche Trail, from Kansas and the Panhandle crossing into Mexico at Boquillas and Lajitas, of the area now known as the Big Bend, to prove their courage and raid for horses, children and women. The reader could then experience both the beauty of the season and the settlers' fear brought by that the moon. Lonesome Dove was of former rangers, men restless to see new country under a good horse, realizing that action is needed while bodies can still cash the checks written by wills; of friendships and loyalties forged in adventures and hardships; of feelings that the conditions and reasons of one's society that once gave purpose to one's life may no longer be valid for one's present country, driving one to find another place and time where that purpose might still be found. Streets of Laredo is of evil men, despicable to the core; of the Mexicans along the border; and of stoic, solid women enduring severe hardship, while remaining steadfast, giving us McMurtry's notion of frontierswomen; of old men "whose wills had begun to resent their weakening bodies." Dead Men Walking is of boys and young men and fools. Comanche Moon is of men and the Indians. The Indians, The People, McMurtry's foils in the first three books, must be understood to understand those who opposed them, the history carved in that opposition, and the sense that man's relationship with the country has always been of one group displacing another by force, sometimes of arms, oftentimes by force of culture. McMurtry's genius is found in his ability through the written page to stir in and leave the reader with the exact feeling felt by his characters, Call and McCrae, at the end of the book, certainly if the reader has not read, or does not plan to immediately pick up and read Lonesome Dove. This is to be the last that McMurtry will give us of Augustus and Woodrow.