Mental Paste a Creed for the Third Millennium

By Paul Gray

Author Colleen McCullough's fourth novel began selling briskly weeks before its official publication. The easy explanation is that the vast audience that enjoyed The Thorn Birds (1977) will buy anything McCullough writes. But something else may be fueling this phenomenon. The appearance of perfection in any form is a rare and noteworthy event. News of its arrival is bound to spread, and perhaps, in this case, the word is already out: A Creed for the Third Millennium could well be the most perfectly awful novel ever published.

The year is 2032, and a new ice age is slowly freezing up the earth. Northern U.S. cities must be largely evacuated every winter and their residents relocated in the Sunbelt. Strict population control is in force, and only a few lucky couples can win the right, in a Government-run lottery, to have a second child. Their chilly, straitened lives have made people understandably glum; the Department of the Environment has been ordered by the President to find some way to cheer them up. Dr. Judith Carriol, a high-ranking official in the department, conducts a massive search and finally finds the person who might be able to inspire the citizenry to go on living: an obscure psychologist in Connecticut named Dr. Joshua Christian.

The hero's surname and initials tip off exactly how the plot will end, which is just as well. McCullough's claim to inverse greatness in this book does not rest on what she tells but on her miraculous ability to tell it | ludicrously. She seems to emulate a process she admiringly ascribes to Dr. Christian: "to ruminate some particularly knotty concept into smooth mental paste." Hence the cascade of cliches, many per page and even paragraph. An adviser tells the President: "It's a hot potato, none hotter. We may be biting off more than we can chew." The "cool lustrous brain" of Judith Carriol manifests itself dimly: "The less people involved, the better," or, "If there is any reason in the world why you are where you are and who you are on this day, the reason is me!"

Carriol thinks Dr. Christian might be a good ersatz messiah because "the man had coined some very quotable quotes." None happens to be included in the novel, but Christian obviously has some way with words: "Too many people are so busy earning salvation in the next life that they only end by screwing this one up." Listening to such remarks, Judith experiences strange sensations indeed: "Her gut was crawling, shivering horrific tides of joy washed higher and higher up the shores of her mind."

Innards are terribly important to all the characters. The President approvingly decides that Dr. Christian has "guts. Scads of guts." Skeptics may argue that such a remark is no funnier than those that appear in many best sellers. They underestimate McCullough's mastery of sublime inanity. What other writer would somberly portray a heroine "feeling her purpose trickle away between her legs like a slow haemorrhage"? Where else could one find a statement both so unconsciously offensive and grammatically inept as "A devout Jew but nonetheless the most Christian of gentlemen, his sins were purely sins of omission and due to thoughtlessness and lack of perception"? No wonder this novel promises to become a blockbuster; readers will be savoring its thousands of gaffes well into the third millennium.