My $.02: Book Review - The Thornbirds

I've just completed The Thornbirds, and I liked it a lot more than I expected to. Not that I expected to dislike it, it just doesn't fit into my typical reading list, as it didn't involve any spaceships, ghoulies, or other such otherworldly nonsense that I usually seek out. No, this is a book about family, or a family anyway. To be quite honest, I'm not sure what it was a book about.

Try not to think of me as dense based on that last sentence (if you must, think of me as dense because I still occasionally have to look at my hands to figure out my right from my left). At the surface, it's a book about Meggie, the lone girl in a family of boys growing up on a tremendous sheep farm in Australia. The book follows Meggie's life as she grows up, helps raise brothers, falls in love with a priest, has kids, yadda yadda yadda.

Except that it's not just about Meggie. She ties everything together, but the book is as much about her mother Fee, a woman who is emotionally detached from her daughter in an effort to avoid the disappointment of watching Meggie make the same mistakes she has and suffering all over again. It's about the brothers, lumped together for the most part as men who have dedicated their lives to their professions as sheepherders, seemingly happy but somewhat oblivious of the world that has passed them by. It about Ralph, a priest who, like the brothers, gives up most everything in pursuit of his vocation, despite the fact that he knows he can never be the priest that he wants to be.

The point is, there is a lot going on, which makes sense, because I don't know many people who could honestly say that not much was going on in their lives. None of it feels forced either - it just feels like things that happen to people. In the end, you feel like you've truly shared a large part of someone's experience in the world.

One of the things I enjoyed so much about this is that it's not just a story about the people, it also a bit of history. Now I know that there are those who argue against "historical fiction", people who will say that you should just read a history book if you want to know something about a time period. The problem is that I don't want a list of facts about a time period. That isn't interesting to me. I want to know how people live during that time, and how their world affected their lives. I would rather read a well researched fiction, even if it does take liberties with some facts, that gives me a glimpse of what actual day-to-day life was like. Besides, history is based on what people remember and how they decide to share that information. Unless I'm watching an actual tape of something that happened, I view all history as historical fiction.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book despite the lack of the fantastical. I'll have to hunt down the miniseries on dvd now, and see how it holds up. I'm not sure I'll be able to accept Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph, but I'll do my best.