“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. 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 movie True Grit is one of my favourite Westerns from recent memory. It probably is my favourite Western ever. I haven’t seen the older John Wayne’s version yet, but maybe there is no need to. Western novels used to be as cheap and common as fish and chips back then. I’ve read some bad ones with impossible heroes that are too smart to be beatable, and it doesn’t make for a fun read. But I love the genre because of how brutal it can be, how unforgiving and how (yes) gritty.
True Grit is not an overly violent novel, nor is it brutal. But there is so much of what we love from the Westerns: revenge, the promise of adventure, a drunken sharpshooter and desperate men who would do any dirty deeds to survive. And there is the element of beating the odds, of being the underdog. I am an absolute sucker for underdog stories.
The 14 year old protagonist of True Grit, Mattie Ross isn’t a Shane-like archetype. She’s a smart girl but she can’t boast of being a sharpshooter or a bar fighter; she’s a mere farm girl from Arkansas. After identifying the body of her father, killed by his farmhand in a drunken stupor, she decided to pursue his murderer by contracting the help of a marshall, Rooster Cogburn. The killer, Tom Chaney, is a wanted man in other states and was being pursued by a full of himself type of Texan marshall, La Boeuf. The chase takes them to the wilderness where civilisation is sparse and the land is still largely managed by the native Indians.
It helps that the book is written from the first person perspective of Mattie Ross. Her language is as cold as the brutality of the genre. Even in her earlier years, she has an apt nose for business, as when she managed to coax $300 from the man whose horses his father bought. She knows when to spend money and takes it as a personal attack if she is cheated off it. Yet, she is fair with money, as her payment to Rooster for procuring his services. And she lies also when she thinks it’s to her advantage. Yet, she is compassionate, as we find out later that she looked after her mother while her siblings went off to be married. If you don’t get it yet, I think Mattie Ross is a fantastic character. I can’t help but think of a teenage Hailee Steinfeld playing the impervious Mattie Ross, and whoever came up with that casting should get an automatic raise.
But it is that GRIT of the novel, spoken true to its title: The lawman and the judge colluding to hide the fact that the lawman in fact, shot a man on the back; Mattie Ross milking the crap out of Colonel Stonehill, Mattie Ross using a corpse to prop herself in a snake pit; and the shootout. This is what I love about the genre, plus the horizon that either promises redemption or doom. It is a genre to be addicted to, and seldom better written than in the case of True Grit.
