Word: doves
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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McMurtry's new novel is both sequel and prequel, chronologically the second installment, though written last, of a four-part saga whose splendid third book (written first) is that most beguiling of all horse operas, 1985's Lonesome Dove. A raunchy, sentimental narration about a couple of old Texas Rangers on a cattle drive, this Pulitzer prizewinner was McMurtry at the absolute top of his form. The author, as much in love with Lonesome Dove as his readers were, contrived a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). It was pale and sad because Gus McCrae, one of his heroes, was dead...
Comanche Moon is in some ways the best of the subsidiary novels propped against the central narration of Lonesome Dove. The core of it is a moody, valedictory view of Southwestern Indians at the time just before and just after the Civil War (which appears only as a distant commotion). Comanche raiding bands in Texas are beginning to starve because whites to the north have slaughtered the buffalo herds. The author develops a couple of minor figures we've met before, the fearsome chief Buffalo Hump and a quizzical tracker named Famous Shoes, who are among the best characters...
Call and McCrae are the author's unsolved problems. In Lonesome Dove they were amusing middle-aged adolescents, which seemed to be the author's gloss on the American West. This means, however, that in the long present novel they spend many, many chapters not maturing: Gus mooning for his lost Clara, and Woodrow being cold to Maggie, his son's mother. When they turn sideways on stage, they are seen to be band-sawed from plywood, a drawback that at last seems to matter...
...marginalization of the older generation in Softley's film appears to have been a deliberate choice. Softley, who previously directed the youth-centered, youth-targeted films Backbeat (chronicling the Beatle who dropped out) and Hackers, makes no bones about adapting The Wings of the Dove for the same age sector: "There was the danger that an audience, though about the same age as these characters, would feel alienated [from them]...I wanted to make something that would appeal to them...
Despite its major alterations of the text it adapts, the form of this version of The Wings of the Dove is in fact fairly conservative. No Campionesque touches a la Portrait of a Lady here. But if it's not a groundbreaking piece of art, it does succeed as a powerful, well acted and unexpectedly poignant story of love and betrayal. The cult of Henry James can take their complaints elsewhere; the rest of us can just enjoy the film as a work inspired by--not transcribed from--a great book...