There are two great American novels narrated through the eyes of children – both girls, as it happens. One is To Kill a Mockingbird and the other? Here’s how it starts.
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 Californian gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Here is what happened …
That’s how True Grit begins. Mockingbird was published in 1960 and True Grit in 1968. Both have been made into excellent films. The former came out in 1962 and was a huge success – a real classic, as good today as it was then, with Gregory Peck playing lawyer, Atticus Finch.
The first film version of True Grit hit the screen only a year after the book was published. It stars John Wayne and while it may be a goodish film it does not capture the spirit of the book – or even the weather for that matter. It was not until 2010 that a really good version was made by the Coen brothers.
But do read the novel. That hard-to-please curmudgeon, Roald Dahl, has this to say about it.
“True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? What a writer!”
A young cousin of mine is moving to a new school next month where she will need true grit – so a copy is on its way to her.
