A Freeway Range Rider Via Cassette

I have been whizzing along the freeways--or, more often, inching along the mysteriously clogged freeways--in the company of a bad Indian named Blue Duck, a beautiful woman named Lorena, an ex-Texas Ranger named Call, a few dozen other characters and 2,000 longhorns. They all take the sting out of the steering wheel, especially in those moments of exasperation when I think the cattle are making better time than I am.

The case for listening to books has never appeared more obvious to me. The p aperback edition of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel “Lonesome Dove� (Pocket Books, $4.95) is 945 pages long and thick as a club sandwich.

The earliest I could foresee leisure time to read it was somewhere after retirement, which is not immediate to begin with. And my dance card for that mystical, mythical time called retirement is so dense with writing projects already that the prospect for getting to “Lonesome Dove� even then did not look good.

The Books on Tape unabridged recording of “Lonesome Dove� is on 27 cassettes in three separately rentable packages, a total of just over 40 hours listening time. I am presently somewhere north of Austin on the cattle drive from Lonesome Dove, which is just above the Mexican border, and if the tape-player holds out I should get to Montana by Memorial Day. I’m not sure I want to get there and have to part company, but that’s another matter.

The reader throughout is Wolfram Kandinsky, whose narrative voice is thin and hard as a strand of fence wire and just right for these proceedings. He commands a nice variety of accents and modulations to keep the speakers straight--Gus is not Captain Call is not the wastrel gambler Jake Spoon is not Lorena or the boy Newt.

But Kandinsky negotiates the vocal shifts without getting overly histrionic and distracting from the sense of the words. In the most helpful sense, the performance is not a performance.

And the text is a wonder, as millions of readers and a fair number of listeners already know. The settling of the West is, after the Revolution itself, the great American epic, a story with the dimensions and the simplicity of myth.

If it wasn’t mythic enough to begin with, a century of pulp fiction and then the Western movies mythed it up to a fare-thee-well, so much so that a backlash of demythologizing took place and pretty well did in the Western as a sure-thing movie genre, throwing out the truths with the lies.

What is most rewarding about “Lonesome Dove� is that McMurtry has restored the epic size of the Western experience without sanitizing it into a fable that defies the everyday facts of history.

McMurtry’s world is as real as a horse bite (an accident which took place offstage, so to speak, in the days before his story begins). Lonesome Dove’s lone piano serves both the saloon and the church, and one Sunday it slipped off the boardwalk linking the two and had to be played extra loud so the sound would carry into the church. The saloonkeeper dreams of a place that would have tablecloths.

The whole place is hot, dusty, boring and poor. Whiskey is the universal lubricant and consolation prize. The time is vaguely between the end of the Civil War and the closing of the frontier in the 1890s. You could still drive a herd north and not meet a fence or, for days on end, another human.

The bantering talk is funny and true; but accident, tragedy and the slower pains of love lost or never found are always right at hand. McMurtry gets inside a disparate bunch of characters--smart, dumb, mean, lazy, weak, strong, likable, the survivors and the doomed.

The action inclines toward a series of set pieces--a storm, a night stampede, crossing a river that proves to be full of water moccasins--and in their clarity and their energy these sequences reminded me of El Sordo’s fight on the hilltop in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.�

The majestic and humbling sky and the land, immense, virgin and charged with both peril and promise, beautifully evoked by the author, give the story its size. McMurtry paints a tough and often mean life, not quite the stuff of nostalgia, you would say. Yet it is impossible not to feel a kind of wistful admiration for the kind of men and women McMurtry has invented and celebrated, who lived in hard times but could dream of endless pastures and rich tomorrows. (Books on Tape: 1-800-626-3333.)