Many times I have been taught that a well written short story is the pinnacle of literary achievement. On an intellectual level I can understand this. To structure a story with introduction, conflict, resolution and conclusion, and to do this within a few pages whilst also having a well conceived plot and some depth of characterisation is indeed admirable. However, on an emotional level it just doesn’t work for me. There has been more than one occasion when I have made a hurried purchase, encouraged by the name of an author that I like, only to find I had actually bought a book of short stories. The book has languished!
I want to climb into a story and become swallowed up by it and for that to happen it needs to be several hundred pages long. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough works for me. I first read this book in the mid 1970s, mostly on a short holiday in the south of Cornwall. I remember having to be very careful not to appear totally unsociable as I could actually have stayed on the sofa with this book all day long. We must have visited some lovely places and had some great walks but decades later I find that my abiding memory of that trip is of reading this book! Even when we were out or having lunch, my head was in the middle of this story. It had truly engulfed me.
Do you remember the Thorn Birds I wonder? It was made into a TV mini series starring Richard Chamberlain. (He of Doctor Kildare, if we go back even further!) The setting is Australia; the New South Wales outback and as you might expect it carries the reader through several generations, beginning in the late 19th century. It is actually quite unusual for me to enjoy this setting. There are many novels focussed on people from the UK relocating to Australia and New Zealand, for one reason or another, in late Victorian and Edwardian times. The descriptions of the heat, the dust and the restrictive, inappropriate clothing that women wore, for the sake of propriety, are positively claustrophobic, particularly if well written. The drudgery, the lack of any conveniences let alone modern ones I can find very lowering. The intensity of the heat somehow just serves to make everything worse. However, despite all those attacks on my sensibilities the story line here obviously hooked me in completely.
Ralph de Bricassart is a Roman Catholic priest who falls in love with Meggie, the only daughter within a large family of boys, living on a huge sheep farm, miles from anywhere. Despite a significant difference in age, the attraction is mutual and of course greatly heightened because of the huge obstacles that are in their way. The Roman Catholic Church and Ralph’s faith stand firmly against their love. The question that goes through most of this very long story, as the characters age and are subject to many of life’s travails is will anything actually come of this relationship that sometimes seems hardly to exist and at other times is full of passion. The description of droughts, floods and fire in this arid, fierce environment seem to me to mirror the ebb and flow and the depth of Ralph and Meggie’s love. The sheep station experiences fires that destroy everything for thousands of miles and yet of course life returns to the earth and it all begins again. At times Ralph and Meggie are apart for years at a time and yet the power of their feeling for each other is immediately evident when they meet again.
One thing that I underlined in the book during this reading (yes I do sometimes write in my books!) is a brilliant description using tenses in an almost metaphorical way. The ‘He’ of these couple of sentences refers to Luke who Meggie marries, almost in desperation. “He was the target of almost as many seductive or languishing looks as Father Ralph used to be, and more blatantly so. As Father Ralph used to be. Used to be. How terrible to have to think of him in the very remotest of all past tenses.” I really like this thought and have noted it for my own writing. All writers are thieves!
With a name like Colleen McCullough, the author obviously has a Celtic heritage, in this case Irish. And thus it is not surprising that she uses a Celtic legend as the premise for this book. The mythical ‘thorn bird’ searches for thorn trees as soon as it hatches. When it finds the perfect tree it cannot resist impaling itself on the largest thorn and then sings the most beautiful song ever heard as it dies. Sometimes we know we are taking action that is self destructive but we cannot prevent ourselves from going ahead.
Having finished The Thorn Birds for probably the third time, I’m now reading a book lent to me by a friend: Sea of Memories by Fiona Valpy. It is so strange the different textures stories can have. This is like eating a subtle, clean sorbet after a heavy main course with a rich sauce, the latter being The Thorn Birds. I’m enjoying it.
Happy reading.