I Read The Thornbirds So You Don’t Have To

Last updated on: February 16, 2015 at 4:01 pm by Calah Alexander

I Read The Thornbirds So You Don’t Have To 2015-02-16T16:01:39-05:00 Calah Alexander

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I took a week off from blogging kind of unintentionally. Actually, what happened is that my friend Anna lent me her late grandmother’s copy of The Thornbirds, since she was horrified to find that I had never read it (I’d never even heard of it till last week). I picked it up idly on Sunday and that was that. My week was shot until I finished it on Thursday, at which point everyone in the house got sick but me.

Of course, they’re all mostly recovered just in time for me to get sick, so I’m feeling sorry for myself. But holy crap, not as sorry as I feel for the characters in The Thornbirds.

Seriously, that is the saddest, bleakest book I’ve read in a long time. It’s totally compelling, and the characters are vivid and fascinating, but by the end I was incredibly annoyed with the author. The book gradually transformed from a tale of one family through three generations into the kind of story that probably inspired Flann O’Brien to write about fictional characters plotting to murder their creator. I’m 99% sure that at some point in the writing process, Colleen McCullough just got sick of her own characters and decided to kill off the ones she liked in the most horrific ways imaginable, and then construct a bleak and well-decorated hellscape for the rest to live in…for pages…and pages….and pages.

There are, however, some important lessons to be learned from The Thornbirds. Here they are, in chronological order:

Italians have lice because they don’t bathe their children.
Nuns are bitter child-abusers.
It’s totally cool to play favorites with your kids.
Don’t worry about explaining the facts of life to your daughter, because that’s what the parish priest is for.
Bodies decomposed really fast before the advent of air conditioning.
Nice guys finish first, because God smites them with actual fire — or a boar.
Lactophilia is a thing. Brain bleach, unfortunately, is not.
Hard-working men who are kind and not misogynistic will never marry or have children — and if they do, the fire thing.
All priests break their vows, unless they happen to be saints, in which case God smites them with heart attacks.
Red-haired girls are sinners.

The point of the novel seems to be, “God hates women, a lot, and women hate Him back.” But for all the feministy rage bubbling up from the pages, the women portrayed in the book were kind of terrible. Yeah, they were victims of a patriarchal culture, but instead of rising above their misfortune and taking the high road, they mostly chose the lowest road possible. And they even admitted — to themselves, no less — that that’s what they were doing. But the thing is, in the fictional world McCullough created, there was no impetus to do the right thing. All the characters who consistently made good choices were struck down by the hand of God in freak accidents. Even the characters who just sometimes tried to do the right thing got kicked by the author when they were down. It’s like Colleen McCullough constructed this horrible world where God destroys everyone’s lives for funsies, and then expected the reader to go along with it and lament the cruelty of such an unjust God. Instead, I ended up lamenting the cruelty of such an unjust author.

And also, the lactophilia. Seriously, why did she have to go there? Why, Colleen, why?

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The Thornbirds

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