Putting Down 'The Thorn Birds'

...For example, the priest privately curses his aging patroness?wicked old spider...

...Interestingly, the actual sex is not unusually titillating: McCullough is explicit only when encounters fail...

...The two meet when Meggie's father, a stockman down on his luck in New Zealand, is summoned by his wealthy, aging sister, Mary Carter, to run—and eventually to inherit—Drogheda, her vast sheep station in New South Wales...

...The declaration has been echoed by so many commentators (as if other words had failed them) and used with suoh extravagance (one of them "scarcely ate or slept for two days") that it has become a phenomenon of its own...

...Many such stories are accompanied by testimonials from reviewers who were unable to put them down until they had finished...

...Yet however well-planned the promotion (and it has been very shrewd—the publisher waited for others to make the Gone with the Wind analogy and has thus far advertised quite sparingly), the book's success seems to reflect the accuracy for most readers of the jacket-blurb assurance that "there is simply no way to put it down once you have begun it...

...There is an analogy here to the kind of music often played at pop concerts, where a tonic chord is pursued for 10 pages and beaten to a bloody pulp for three pages more...

...The central liason in the three-generation epic is between a handsome, ambitious priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart, and the beautiful, spirited Meggie Cleary...

...He will read on simply to find out how the inevitable will take place?how the priest's tenderness for the child will become passion for the woman, how his ambiton will result in his becoming a cardinal...

...When the hardcover edition came out in mid-May, there were 225,000 copies on hand...

...We are distressed, too, by the free-floating mythic suggestiveness that plays throughout, most of it having to do with symbolic incest...

...Trade and reprint people read the finished draft nonstop over a weekend...

...True, even hack reviewers are usually wary of devaluing the currency with this clich6...

...God rot her...

...The bulk of it, he says, he would describe as "sentimental romance," a category that extends and developes the "naive" formulas found in folk and fairy tales...

...A licensed voyeurism...

...While Che book certainly has these qualities, I would not link them to its style, or styles—which seem to derive from (and sometimes unwittingly to parody) a great many old-fashioned novels...

...we find the continuity of reading easier because of an exceptionally vigorous pacing supplied by the convention...

...The many variations of romance make up a structure that Frye sees as constituting an eternal vision of the world—a secular parallel of sacred scripture...

...Eight houses competed for paperback rights, with the winner, Avon, bidding a record $1.9 million...

...Great literature, Frye contends, is "the genuine infinite" as opposed to "the phony infinite, the endless adventures and the endless sexual stimulation of the wandering of desire...

...A hint that a priest's curses are efficacious...

...In his 1975 Norton Leotures at Harvard—published last year as The Secular Scripture (Harvard, 188 pp., $8.95)—Frye elaborates on his theory of popular literature...

...Ultimately, though, I think that what "spurs the reader on" is nothing more than the conventional plot...

...He then adds a crucial qualification: "But I have a notion that if the wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either...

...Love for a priest is love for a "father...

...Would a humanities degree have prepared him for tears...

...Hence romance appears to be designed...

...The central element is a love story, and the exciting adventures are normally a foreplay leading to a sexual union...

...not red, not gold, but a perfect fusion of both . . . eyes like melted jewels...

...A normal printing for a novel with reasonably good expectations is 15,000...

...Another editor, who also found it unputdownable, felt compelled to add, "It's not my kind of book at all...

...and the accolade differs from most others in assuming widespread intellectual resistance to the very elements that promise to make the book a hit: The reader should want to set it aside and go about his business, but won't be able to...

...Closely regarded by anxiety, it turns out to be far worse...

...In four weeks Thorn Birds was Number One on the New York Times best-seller list...

...No one claims The Thorn Birds is great literature, yet it does raise some interesting questions about this "wandering...

...Whoever gets this far will not be put off by the prose, and knows what will happen...

...Only once the tale has been told does the kill-joy in the reader emerge, making him recognize that the force carrying him along has been the momentum of conventions...

...Popular fiction, Northrop Frye has said, is "stylized and conventional to a very marked degree...

...The author is at her best in describing the swarming fauna, the dramatic monsoons and droughts, the floods and fires of her native Australia...

...De Bricassart reports that his mother had hated him: "My name ought to have been Hippolytos...

...The story sets up a curious sequence of expectations during the "continuous" experience of reading that is not clear until the novel is over, and the "discontinuous" process of criticism (the distinction is Frye's) has begun...

...The author, described as a redheaded Amazon from down under, reportedly wore gloves to keep her fingers from blistering as she pounded out her 280,000-word Australian family saga, typing 80 words a minute, 15,000 of them at a single sitting...

...As Cleary arrives with his large family, the then 27-year-old priest, who is the old woman's protege, "strides unconcernedly toward them through the inches-deep dust...

...Then one sees that for half the book one has waited for the illicit love to be consummated, and for the other half one has waited for it to be punished...

...when they are blissful she tends toward a rhetoric of "melting bones" and "roped limbs...

...Erwin Glikes, trade editor of Harper & Row, told Publisher's Weekly that he wept during his marathon weekend with the book?unusual for someone like me, with a social-science background...

...And his further observations would seem to explain the qualified responses to The Thorn Birds that I have cited...

...Both experts counted on selling to millions who clamor for a "good read," yet thought that most serious people, like themselves, would pass up the opportunity...

...McCullough's accomplishment lies in her large acquaintance with them, and in her skill at exploiting the "wandering of desire" while keeping inhibitions (and ordinary skepticism) temporarily at bay...

...At the same time, he acknowledged that something "spurs the reader on"—specifically, a style "driven by a curiosity of mind, a caring for the subject, and some great energy within the author...

...We know in advance the kind of story we are going to read, and...

...That resistance was already apparent in the preliminary reactions to Thorn Birds...

...To say that one cannot put this book down is really another way of saying that it is the most conventional novel to appear in a long time...

...He is soon thinking of 10-year-old Meggie as "the sweetest, most adorable little girl he had ever seen, hair...

...Writers & Writirig PUTTING DOWN THE THORN BIRDS' by RUTH MATHEWSON EVEN allowing for book-industry hyperbole, Colleen McCulIough's new novel, The Thorn Birds (Harper & Row, 530 pp., $9.95), was a prepublica-tion phenomenon...

...Bantam, the runner-up, stopped at the $1.85 million it paid for Ragtime two years ago...

...Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a Village Voice review, expressed the ambivalence in another way: He found The Thorn Birds "a fine book," with a "refreshing wholesomeness," but it didn't make him laugh or cry, and he could put it down, he said, "because it is, after all, a romance...

...Nor would I attribute the smashing success of The Thorn Birds to its bringing an unknown continent to life...

...If she dies soon afterward, and her corpse does rot in the summer heat, what satisfaction have we derived...

...Still, to say now that a novel is impossible to put down is to announce a "big" romance...

...She succeeds as well in communicating her extensive knowledge of work processes by including such telling details as the 26 circles bleached in the sheepshed floor by the sweat of the 26 shearers...

...Thus the narrative serves both the rake and the censor in the reader, whose returning sense of discrimination makes him wonder at his easy surrender to each...

...Because this kind of fiction is designed to entertain, he believes, "guardians of taste" consider it a waste of time...

...More than the fact of wish fulfillment, the atavistic quality of the wishes fulfilled are disconcerting to sober second thought...

...there are strange understandings between mothers and sons, between sister and brother...

...to encourage excessive or irregular sexual activity...

...The reference is never developed, but it reminds us that the novel is not so "wholesome" as Fremont-Smith thought...

...His long soutane made him seem like a figure out of the past, as if he did not move on feet like ordinary men, but drifted dreamlike...