McCullough turns to psychiatry

Press, 5 December 1981, Page 16

McCullough turns to psychiatry

An Indecent Obsession. By Colleen McCullough. Harper and Row, 1981. 317 pp. $19.95.

(Reviewed by

Ralf Unger)

Miss McCullough became a literary phenomenon with her novel “The Thornbirds” which flew with jet velocity into the list of bestsellers. A large panorama, it was populated by numerous characters with strong passions which they tried with great strength to control, and who lived amid deep spiritual as well as physical loves and hates. One of the most surprising factors in its success was its artificiality of literary style. This is again evident in her new novel. Her characters do not speak as do most people one meets. For example, “Don’t you love me now at all” she asked. And, “Oh, Michael, I can stand anything but losing your love!” The characters do not think of such things as love and duty in the way of most of our acquaintances — for instance, “understanding that duty, the most indecent of all obsessions, was only another name for love.” They view the nursing profession as an almost divine calling, unlike nurses one has known. Their physical encounters, after breaking down fortresses of puritanical reserve, enter into the deepest recesses of the soul as well as the body. The author seems to model her

characters upon life seen at one step removed, life seen through romantic literature of a past, soft-coloured era transplanted to the modern day. The story, in spite of this constant

irritant of style, is again an absorbing one. A tiny psychiatric ward in a base hospital on a Pacific island just after the Second World War is supervised by an efficient, but deeply emotionally involved young Sister. Her knowledge of psychiatry appears to be zero and her inability to objectify her patients makes for a very close approximation of a family unit. This inexorably pounds towards tragedy and disappointment with a rising from the ashes of the obviously named Honour Langtry devoting the remainder of her life to genuine psychiatric nursing. The handful of soldier patients have mostly been sent to the ward because of their embarrassment to the army, rather than because of classifiable mental illness. One patient is actually completely normal and becomes the first object of “Sis’s” obsession before her more general, more humanitarian feelings win the day. No doubt this novel will again do very well for the Australian author with the background a much more concentrated set than in her previous novel, but one trusts that she was a more natural nurse in her own time than she is a selfconscious, successful writer.