12/14/2023 0 Comments True grit bookThe language and detail embed the book firmly and unforgettably in the world it has set out to create.Įqually unforgettable and brilliantly convincing is the narrator’s voice, that of little Mattie Ross. And by the time you emerge from their world you will know what is meant by a writ of replevin, a slicker, a kingbolt, a middlebuster, and you’ll be acquainted with corn dodgers and clabber, hot tamales and sofky and grits, all washed down with double-rectified busthead. They will be carrying weapons like the Henry rifle, the Sharp carbine and the Colt dragoon. In this alien but authentic world you will meet good guys with names like LaBoeuf (pronounced La-Beef ) and Rooster Cogburn and Yarnell Poindexter, and encounter human trash (Mattie’s unforgiving expression) such as Odus Wharton, Lucky Ned Pepper and the original Greaser Bob. You are going to be taken to places with names like Dardanelle, the Poteau river, the Winding Stair mountains, Wagoner’s Switch, Chickamauga and many a tight and terrifying spot in the Choctaw Nation – the Indian Territory of what is present-day Oklahoma. As avenger and upholder of moral law, there is a larger-than-life scripturalism about Mattie which, like her insistent pedantry and attention to detail, is going to be one of the arresting features of the novel.īut while revealing her character and something of her world, the opening gives little indication of the surprises that litter the narrative. Tom Chaney is not only a thief and a killer, he is also a coward, and she will make him pay, both for his felony and for his moral depravity. The remarkable thing is that the ruthless recorder of these offences is not the eternal angel behind the Book of Judgement but a self-tutored girl, an innocent virgin in whom puberty has barely started.Īnd there is the element of judgement in her voice. The criminal will answer for every last transgression. She is pedantic in her pursuit of justice. The money and the horse are of course trivial, you would say, in comparison with the father’s life, of which Chaney robbed her. What you are aware of here is not so much the potential excitement that lies ahead as the relentless factualism of Mattie Ross’s mind and manners, and of her account: the time, the place, the details of the crime, all listed. Nor does the opening sentence of the novel offer much more promise of what is to come by way of these incredible and enthralling adventures: ‘People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the winter time to avenge her father’s blood – but I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money, plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.’ The casual geographical precision and the simple, telling detail about the weather make it sound almost banal – ironically so after you have just read her amazing account of her adventures, while on another level the biblical cadences will make you prick up your ears. Look at Mattie’s concluding sentence again. Mattie’s story has all the authority of the truth-teller who has successfully created that other world, the one in which, like the Wedding Guest, you cannot choose but believe, even though you know it’s an illusion, that Mattie does not exist, that the real voice belongs to Charles Portis, the enigmatic recluse who wrote the novel in 1968. That phrase ‘true account’ is vital to the fiction. The last sentence of True Grit, spoken by its narrator and heroine, Mattie Ross, declares that ‘this ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground’. The new world the author creates is peculiar and true to that particular poem, play or novel, and true to no other. Homer did it, Shakespeare did it, the Brontës and Dickens did it. This is the godlike miracle of great writing. The plot and the setting, the characters and their language – all exist elsewhere, and you merely overhear, oversee, even though you are drawn into the very heart and essence of the creation. Paradoxically you will inhabit it intimately as an autonomous world existing independently of you, the reader. It must invent that world and transport you into it, and make you believe in it, from first sentence to last. There are many definitions of what makes a great work of literature, but for my money a great book must do one thing above all else: it must create a world of its own, with its own unique atmosphere and moral universe.
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