The Thorn Birds 
In the past week I re-read Colleen McCullough’s “the Thorn Birds”, this time in English, the language it was originally written. I’ve watched the television miniseries once, read the book twice, but the story never ceases to amaze me. What a marvel of a creation for a writer! How did Colleen McCullough do it? Write such a sweeping tale of family saga. The story has a dazzling web of themes: family, man, woman, God, and love. It is so ambitious, yet so well achieved its goal, as only masters of story-telling can do. It is so tender and moving at times that it melts your heart, but at the same time, never for a moment does it forget the cruelty, irony and savageness of life. In fact, that is the whole point of the book, isn’t it? The cruelty and irony of life, yet the beauty that lies within, as if only brought on to existence by the former, or at the very least could not exist alone but with such a company.
It is a book about one family, yet it is also about all human beings: our nature and fate, all of us. It is a drama of Adam, Eve, and God, acted out by members of one family, on the broad stage of 20th century, Australia. The depth of the book awes me. McCullough wrote the book when she was 40 years old. How did one become so wise and have such piercing observations at that age? As if she had sit quietly watching this world for more than a century. Oh, how I wish to meet her!
