Word: thornes
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...THORN BIRDS...
...fate of The Thorn Birds will certainly not hang on literary merit. With the broadest strokes and the most perfervid prose, the novel traces three generations of the Cleary family-from poverty in New Zealand to wealth in Australia to triumphs on the London stage and in the Vatican. None of the Clearys, however, is as interesting as Australia itself. McCullough knows how to stage convincing droughts, floods and fires. Even her descriptions of landscapes sometimes flare into life...
...fact, most of the male characters come off poorly in The Thorn Birds. A fairly typical sentence runs: "She eyed his flaccid penis, snorting with laughter." The ambitious men are silly and the steady ones are inconsequential. Meggie's eight brothers either die or disappear into the woodwork. Women seem to live forever, while every hundred pages or so another man is burned alive or disemboweled by a wild boar or drowned or unsexed by gunshot wounds. None of this carnage is required by the plot. The males are punished because their punishment is what romantic fiction requires...
...traced back to Jane Eyre (1847), both a superb novel and the prototypical romance. The haughty Rochester had to be maimed and blinded before he was suitably domesticated as a mate for the governess heroine. If this deep psychological lode still runs through newly raised consciousnesses, then The Thorn Birds will probably clean up as handsomely as its promoters hope. In any case, its fate will be a barometer of taste circa the late '70s. McCullough has not made literature. For a season or so, her book will make commercial history. Paul Gray
...director Don Pullum '79 and his cast produce a play worthy of the script's brilliance. Most of the characters are natural and believable, and a few are portryed superbly. Marley Clause '79, cast as a conquettish Concord girl who nearly wins Thoreau's heart, is quite professional. James Thorn '79 does a good job of playing an aging Ralph Waldo Emerson. Augustine Caimi '79, as Thoreau's cellmate, and John Newport '78, as Thoreau's brother, put on fine performances as well. But the nature of the play demands that the portrayal of Thoreau be executed with perfection...