We're pushing the fast-forward button here to 2032–33—not quite 50 years from now. But when you think that 50 years ago, Rudolph Valentino had already been dead for almost a decade, you see how fast time flies. So what's good about Colleen McCullough's novel, set in a future where people are freezing to death, is that it's not too far in the future. We don't have a lot of exotic hardware to confound those of us who can barely set a digital watch.

Still, we want explanations for things that are not forthcoming. If, for instance, the Greenhouse Theory—among others—is correct and the Earth is getting warmer, why, in fewer than 50 years, will we be in an ice age? What happened? And at one point, the hero mentions—only in passing, mind you—that the average life expectancy is now 40. What happened in 50 years to lower it? (We are told that people don't smoke anymore, that "the expectancy of nuclear war disappeared, as did really irresponsible government" as well as "territorial usurpation, even starvation.")

But what really confounds about A Creed for the Third Millennium is the blurb on its cover: "A novel by the author of The Thorn Birds." No! That writer had an inner ear for graceful prose! She would never create the awkward, rambling, clumpy sentences in Millennium. She wouldn't reverse the basic writing dictum of "show, don't tell" the way this author does—especially about her female protagonist, Dr. Judith Carriol, who is "tall and fashionably elegant," "obsessively tidy and formidably efficient." Would a McCullough novel suffer mortally, as this does, from lack of subtlety and nuance? About our hero, Dr. Joshua Christian's sister-in-law, we read: "snorted Miriam"; "sneered Miriam"; "snarled Miriam"—and that's all on just pages 90 and 91! The author of this futuristic novel is also curiously given to archaic "nays" and "perforces." People are even "wont to enveigh." And all the main characters chew their lips in consternation. What with all this snarling, snorting and chewing, it's small wonder that one of the best things in the book is a little illustration on the nature of cats.

As to the main story, with a hero named Joshua Christian (J.C., get it?), who lives with his mother and a band of disciplelike family members called Mary, Martha, James and Andrew and who, we are told over and over, has "charisma" and is "chosen" to save the people, it isn't too hard to guess the ending.

Though much of the first and last sections of the book are embarrassingly bad, there is a treasure in the middle comprised of some of the spiritual message put into Joshua Christian's mouth. In a world gone gray, where everyone is cold and rootless through perpetual "relocations," where population is government controlled, where too much leisure ("Men nowadays are more often paid not to work") has increased national apathy, Christian has some healing words for his people suffering from "millennial neurosis." But anyone in 1985 who is given to blaming the "times" or "circumstances" for not getting on with their lives could underline a few things here. Instead of mooning for the past, make the best of a present that's not all you wish it were! Get up in the morning and find some purpose and peace and love in your life anyway. Make it happen! This "Christian philosophy" tells us to look to a God of our own understanding: "Don't shut out God from your mind or spirit because you can't take up membership in a church." However, a Creed for the Third Millennium's Christian philosophy is so far from the fundamentalists' that if this novel becomes a TV movie and is run during Easter week, it will be denounced from the pulpits. And that would be exactly like The Thorn Birds.