荆棘鸟读后感英文版
Writers of books such as Le Mis, Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds seemed to have all the time in the world, nothing to do but tell you a story, from the moral of the tale, the fate of the characters to details such as the color of one’s hair when the morning light strikes.
“Sit down, child. Let me tell you a story of a lifetime. Listen to me, not just for a day, a month, but a year. Keep me company and I will tell you all the wisdom I know, just listen to my story.” The book seems to say.
Some say The Thorn Birds is the Gone with the Wind of Australia. It does remind you of it, the small print, the length of the book, the expanse of the story and the fineness of the details. But I don’t see the resemblance in the souls of the two books. Meggie lived for another man while Scarlett lived for herself. One so soft you pity her, the other so headstrong you can’t bother feeling sorry for her. One can’t hold on to the man she loves, the other threw aside her one true love.
In spirit, it’s more like The Scarlet Letter. Forbidden love is always more tantalizing than romance of plain nature, always more intense with a lifetime of bittersweet aftertaste. Let’s not envision what would have happened if the fallen priest does marry the woman he loves. Reality never fails to rub the shine off any great passion. It’s the best cure to love-sickness.
Ralph, the handsome priest, so charming and perfect that from an old woman of seventy to a child of ten, no woman can escape from his pull, whether or not he does any intentional pulling. He was made for trouble, tall and attractive, but cloaked in the soutane of a priest. And above all his faith, his love for the church and for God, is there anything more frustrating than a perfectly sculptured man, trained with the elegance of a gentleman and the pureness of a saint, but thrown into the lay crowd, to be loved and adored, but not touched.
Our little Meggie steals the readers’ hearts right from the start. With its nearly 600 pages of flowing words and unrolling scenes, I remember the first scene the best. It’s the one that touches me the most. It tells you right away who is the gentle victim of the whole epic.
Little Meggie, dressed in her Sunday best, was squatting down behind the gorse bush, holding her very first gift on her fourth birthday. It was a little doll, bought from a store in town with money, with money! Meggie saw the doll in the store on her only trip to town and fell in love with it. Their lives on the raw land in rural New Zealand in the early twentieth century didn’t involve much buying, not to mention wasting money on buying a gift for a little girl, even a very good little girl.
She held Agnes, the name she gave the doll the moment she saw it. She marveled at the doll’s golden hair, her cream lace dress and her eyes that close when you lie her down and then open when you stand her up. Agnes was all the desire that Meggie knew and she sat there taking it all in.
It’s a sweet picture until the boys came into the scene. Meggie’s elder brothers saw their baby sister so engrossed that they had to poke their noses in. I knew it smelt of trouble and I wish I had the power to push the stop button and erase the boys or turn their crude minds elsewhere. But that’s not to be. Little Meggie will be hurt by little boys, just like the older Meggie will be hurt by grown men. No one can push the stop button and rewrite the scene.
The boys took the doll that was barely warm in Meggie’s hands, with their rough and dirty paws pulled the doll apart, like dissecting anything that they didn’t understand. It’s all just some plastic to them, no feelings.
My heart aches for little Meggie, so helpless, so young and so weak. She cried and begged but she couldn’t g