Customer Reviews

The Lonesome Gods

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I love fiction books that include factual, historical data that teach you about California, as you read. Louis L'Amour is a master story teller. He captures your imagination with his courageous, but human, characters (male & female alike). I couldn't put this book down and was disappointed when it ended. It touched me in a way that caused me to look harder at myself, as a person. It encouraged me to say to myself, "I am a child of God and nothing will cause me to be afraid." -- I'm a tougher, better person because of this book. Read it and let it move you, too!

You could review this book critically detail by detail, but in the end this is classic L'Amour. I don't believe he ever wrote a bad book. No, I'm sure he never did. Some of the books are similar, some are vastly different. He proved himself able to write more than "just westerns". Louis' depth is seen in books like Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, and Hills of Homicide.

The book is interesting in that the lead role, Johannes Verne, is without full time adult supervision from a very young age and with the help of friendly indians must provide for himself. From my recollection this is the youngest character of L'Amour's to "go it alone". In this way, this book is similar to Reilly's Luck ( another youngster alone).

This book seems to take a look at eternal things. There is mention of God and the story line is developed along the idea that many gods have existed through time. Men come and go and their gods are left behind with no one remembering who they are or what purpose they served. Unlike God, they are lonesome and left with no followers or those that look after their shrines. Johannes Verne identifies with them out of pity for there lonliness.

Although somewhat predictable, I say "who cares". L'Amour's work is excellent. The reasons we love it are the imagery, storytelling, and the close bond we feel with the characters.

I'm a big fan of Louis L'amour but, ultimately, I found "The Lonesome Gods" to be a rather mediocre effort. It suffers from an excess of historical data which, while interesting, doesn't really serve to advance the plot, weak character development, and an ending that's just a little too pat.

The story moves along at a good pace at first with the tale of how Johannes Verne's dying father brought him west in the hopes that his estranged grandfather would take the boy in once his father passed on. However, once Johannes reach Los Angeles the story slows down considerably. At this point not a lot is happening with his characters so L'amour glosses over the passage of large spans of time and spends a great deal of time presenting historical information about the early years of the city but most of it isn't really relevant to the story. The result is that the story becomes bogged down in useless data that doesn't do anything to advance the plot. Making matters worse, I found his handling of the passage of time to be somewhat disorienting and on more than one occasion I found myself wondering if it had just been a few days or a few years since something had happened in the story.

Usually I feel that L'amour is pretty good about developing his characters within the constraints allowed by his stories. Unfortunately that's not the case here. The only character to really feel fully fleshed out is Johannes, though the elder Verne and Miss Nesselrode are also fairly well presented. Everyone else is just sort of presented in a peripheral manner and never really achieve a status above stock character types. This becomes very frustrating later in the book when a number of characters are introduced who clearly have interesting stories of their own (Yacub Khan really deserves his own book) but we never really learn the stories. Instead the characters just appear out of nowhere with a little foreshadowing, perform their appointed tasks, and disappear again as if they were never there.

Finally, the ending is just a bit too neat. It really feels like L'amour decided the novel had reached the right length and decided to just wrap things up in a nice, neat little package. Everything just suddenly falls into place to bring the story to an end. For example, one villainous character suddenly has a complete change of heart and instantly goes from bad guy to romantic interest with no real explanation.

All that said, it's still an enjoyable read. It's just that it's far from the best that L'amour ever wrote. I would not recommend this book as an introduction to his work as I can see the slow pace of the book turning off some people. Instead I would suggest something like "Hondo".

The Lonesome Gods by Louis L'Amour was, in my opinion, one of his more creative works. It touches on spiritualism and faith in a very basic and heartwarming way.

How like Louis L'Amour to diversify from his normal mode of writing and still do a fantastic job of telling the story.

Some of my friends did not think it had a contiguous storyline, but I think it conveyed the thoughts and imagination of the writer quite well.

Of course it had flaws --- it was written by a human being. Almost all books do. Still, I consider it a good read and would recommend it to anyone.

Just looking at its spine, you can see "The Lonesome Gods" is one of prolific Western author Louis L'Amour's more ambitious works. You could fit three "Guns Of The Timberlands" in its 450 pages, with room for a few "Yondering" short stories. L'Amour chooses a broad canvas for himself, dusty southern California before the Civil War, and creates a hero who makes his way among vaqueros, Cahuillas, and the ghosts of those long gone still lingering amid the cholla and chaparral.

It's not a great book but a good one, pleasant company despite a plot full of wooden dialogue, encyclopedic exposition, and characters that seem to parachute in from other novels. In her review below, Julie Marie Healy notes how the hero, Johannes Verne, is way too self-sufficient to be plausible, and that's true, especially since he's only a teenager by the end.

But L'Amour produces a real page-turner, with a sense of significance and mystical sweep above and beyond the many satisfying action scenes. It's not a slow book at all. L'Amour shows off why he was considered such a fine storyteller; keeping a number of plot plates spinning at once. His masterly ability to write of nature is especially strong here, describing a then-merciless part of the country better known today for hosting the Bob Hope golf tournament.

"In the night that followed, she wondered if he was out on the dark trails of night where owls cruised on silent wings among the dark ranks of the soldier pines, and only the wind for company." Okay, writing that out I can see the man used "night" and "dark" twice in one sentence, but that's a sweet sentence still, and there's more where that came from in "The Lonesome Gods."

I also like the cast of the book, especially the females, who are more complex than you usually get from L'Amour. A lot of Westerns are chock full of anonymous cowpokes who exist only to be either shot down or avenged by the hero. One thing I like a lot about L'Amour is he never populated his books with extras that way. Every player has his or her own story, and while many may be two-dimensional, they have real integrity.

There's a nice moment, lasting about a page, where Verne shoots a minor bad guy waiting to ambush him. As the guy is dying, the two have a conversation, and it becomes clear under other circumstances they might have been friends, except for the bounty on Verne's head.

"Fifty dollars?" asks Verne. "It was not enough."

"Who knows?" the wounded villain manages to utter before dying, "his cheek against the rocks, his eyes staring toward the fire."

"Lonesome Gods" has a lot of eerie moments like that, perhaps a reflection of an aging author wanting to say something about man's mortality and what he leaves behind. The resulting ambition may account for some sloppy moments, but there's uplift as well as entertainment to be found here.

This was one of L'Amour better books. I loved the way we grew up with Johannes. This book was well written (I didn't give it 5 stars because there were a few parts I rolled my eyes), but other than that, worth the read.
The spirituality the desert and Indians brought to the book was one of my favorite parts. There is life bigger than us - L'Amour was able to express it in an entertaining way.
Unlike one of the other reveiwers I felt he expanded on the characters of the book - and the last 50 pages or so I couldn't put it down - always a sign of a good book.

19th Century California revealed in an entertaining, smartly written tale by a great writer. L'Amour includes all the ingredients of a riveting tale in The Lonesome Gods.

From beginning to end the story is full of action and intrigue with characters that run the gamut from good to evil, simple to mysterious, heroes and villains.

There is nothing disappointing in the novel. The only shortcoming for me is the hint of the ideal in the protagonists. The father and son and heroine seem too good and well-rounded to be true. I think the protagonists fulfill the roles of an ideal man and woman by doing the right things, being independent, strong fighters, and also philosophers and full of wisdom. The one fault in the development of the protagonists is that they are faultless.

Besides this one sliver of criticism, this book offers exceptional, eloquent writing and a superb story.

This book will transport you to the time and place as it captivates and entertains.

This book was enjoyable and difficult to put down. Some cool twists.

I had high expectations from this book because of the author. I was not disappointed in some respects, but in others I feel this book lacked. What I enjoyed were the colorful descriptions and accurate historical information about the early days of Los Angeles and the desert areas surrounding it. I also appreciated the way the Native Americans were portrayed--not as enemies, but as a complex people whose ways of thinking were deep and unique.
However... was it me, or was Johannes a little too perfect? We have in him a man who is strong, wise, mature, intelligent, competent, open-minded beyond his years and time... and the list could go on and on. I had trouble identifying with him throughout the entire book. Aside from some characters, like Miss Nesselrode, I felt the rest of the people populating this book were a little two dimensional. I especially did not like Meghan, who seemed a little too silly for someone like Johannes. Lastly, there were a few infodumps about historical Los Angeles that were a little to textbook for me.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. Some parts had me up embarrassingly late as I read to find out what happened next. I took off one star for the flaws I mentioned above, but I would reccommend this book to anyone.

Louis L'Amour is a great story teller, but he lacks depth. The book has about 10 storylines that somehow all come together in the last few pages. I do not agree that the characters are realistic. It is a good entertaining book if you like westerns, but the writing and development could be better.