A Man's Gotta Do...

 I was thinking recently, as I browsed the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, that it's about time I read a man's book. Anyone who follows this blog must have noticed that, in the field of fiction at least, women are notably over-represented in my reading, with all those Ivys and Muriels and Willas and Penelopes and Shirleys and Barbaras. I make no apology for this: I think many of the best English and American novels of the 20th century were written by women, many of whom are still underrated. Of course I do quite often read novels by men, but do I read anything much written for men? Do I read anything written in genres that are themselves aimed at men? Well, in recent times I've read and hugely admired two novels that would have to be classed as westerns – Charles Portis's True Grit and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing, but both of these I think transcend their genre; I would class them as classic novels that happen to be westerns. I also greatly enjoyed Donald E. Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished, which I guess could be classed as a thriller, and is certainly a 'man's book'... Maybe it was time to just go ahead and read another, maybe even a western? Sure enough, as I thought these thoughts, the solution practically leapt off the shelf into my hand – a classic western, Elmore Leonard's Hombre, in a paperback edition with a cover unambiguously decorated with the image of a Colt 45 (or something similar). 'Come on,' it seemed to say, 'if you think you're hard enough...'
  As I'm still in a somewhat depleted condition thanks to this annoyingly persistent bug, Hombre has been the kind of undemanding reading I needed. It's a plain tale, plainly told, but artfully framed as the true account of one Carl Everett Allen, who saw it all with his own eyes, and was persuaded to write it down as best he could. In a disarming prologue, he writes that 'I was advised to imagine I was telling it to a good friend and not worry about what other people might think. Which is what I have done. If there's anything anybody wants to skip, like innermost thoughts in places, just go ahead.' Well, there's not much need for  skipping: Henry James it ain't. Carl is a young man, rather naive and much of the time as ignorant as we are of what's going on, so his telling of the story enacts a process of discovery in which he is alongside the reader. This works well, and keeps the reader hooked to the unfolding story, which is probably one that most people are already vaguely aware of – even I was, I think from faint memories of the 1967 Martin Ritt movie. It begins as a stagecoach tale, that classic set-up, as used in the 1939 film that made John Wayne a star (and, come to that, as in the haunting final section of the Coen Brothers' Ballad of Buster Scruggs) – strangers, or near strangers, who, from various motivations, end up together, making what becomes a perilous journey in a stagecoach, or rather a mud wagon that's been commandeered as a substitute. And one figure dominates all, the enigmatic Apache-reared outsider known as 'Hombre' (memorably Paul Newman in the film). When the party find themselves in mortal danger, will Hombre go his own way and save his own life, or rescue the people who have, in their different ways, treated him as an outcast? 
  As narrative is generally not the thing I read a novel for, Hombre has not yielded the deeper satisfactions of fiction, but I didn't expect it to, so I'm not complaining. Though I'm really no judge, it strikes me as a very good, maybe a classic, western, and I've enjoyed reading it. At the very least, it's made a refreshing change from all those Ivys and Muriels and the rest...