True Grit by Charles Portis: book review

True Grit (1968) is set in the 1870s in Arkansas, America. The narrator is 14-year-old Mattie Ross.

Twenty-five-year old bachelor Tom Chaney had just shot and killed her father Frank Ross, and had fled the scene, headed for the Indian territory, and joined by a band of outlaws.

The enraged teenager wants revenge for her family, her mother, and brother Little Frank. She intends to kill Tom if the law ‘fails to do so.’ She encounters people who try to belittle her, which of course makes her madder. There are many people who want to collect the bounty for Tom Chaney – it’s a lot of money.

Matttie enlists the help of ‘old’ one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn – the forty-year-old with true grit – to find the killer.

Sergeant of Texas Rangers, LaBoeuf, offers his assistance too, and so does Yarnell Poindexter, born of free parents, who has the block of land near the Ross farm and has known Mattie for all her years.

Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf ride out on horseback to find Tom Chaney. ‘There is nothing in this plan but a lot of killing,’ says LaBoeuf.

Mattie sees Tom first. She aims her dragoon revolver right at him. And this is the test of her metal and the test of the true motives of her companions.

Rooster Cogburn is played by John Wayne in the 1969 movie of True Grit, with Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. The 2010 re-make starred Jeff Bridges as Rooster, Matt Damon as LaBoeuf, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie.

Mattie, in her account of the story, is simplistic, unsentimental, and emotionless, yet with a distinctive voice. In the pursuit of her father’s killer, she is single-minded. Charles Portis has written an amazing story – a classic – and its extraordinary climax will grip readers.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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