Bibliofreakblog

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

The Thorn Birds is an epic, multi-generational story set in Australia’s Outback from 1915 to the ’60’s.  If you think, Oh, it is in the 20th Century, life must not have been so bad on an Australian sheep farm in the 1900’s, you are totally wrong.

In the middle generation is Meggie, sole girl in a family of brothers.  The novel starts off when she is four, living in New Zealand.  Shortly thereafter, the family packs up and moves to the dusty Outback to tend sheep for a rich relative.  

This is when Meggie meets the priest who will become the love of her life when she grows up, Father Ralph de Bricassart. 

I always think that romances between a woman and much older man in literature is strange, especially when he takes an interest in her, however platonically, when she is still a child.  However, McCullough is deft enough to illustrate this attraction as if they are compelled to each other.  Since Ralph is a priest, this further complicates things.  

Meggie and Ralph’s is a denied love, and the reader aches for them and with them.

Meanwhile, life on the sheep farm is not easy.  Years of drought and wild fires plague their economy.  Sickness abounds and for a poor family in the first half of the 20th century, in can be deadly.

Relationships within the family are tough as well.  Meggie’s oldest brother and father do not get along, for mysterious reasons that are revealed only after pages and pages of defiance and head-butting.  

This book was made into a mini series during the 80’s not long after the book’s first publication.  I remember seeing a re-run of the series on TV many years ago.  I think I only saw the first part, because what I distinctly remember was the part where Meggie as an adolescent thinks she is dying because she gets her period and her mother had never explained it to her.  Father Ralph comes to the rescue and explains the birds and the bees.  I remember I was only a child when watching it, but thinking, what an idiot.  Indeed, it is still the part of the book that stands out to me as unbelievable.  For crying out loud, the family raised sheep, did she really not know how things work?

I think that that instance is meant to emphasize Meggie’s loneliness and distance from her mother, while setting up a reliance on Ralph, but really, to me, it is just funny.  And other than that, it’s a pretty great, if long, read.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

The Time Traveler’s Wife (F) by Audrey Niffenegger
The Power and the Glory (F) by Graham Greene
Pride and Prejudice (F) by Jane Austen
The Forgotten Garden (F) by Kate Morton
The Whale Rider (F) by Witi Ihimaera
Rabbit-Proof Fence (F) by Doris Pilkington
My Place (CNF) by Sally Morgan
The Bone People (F) by Keri Hulme 
Gone With the Wind (F) by Margaret Mitchell
The Book of Q (F) by Jonathan Rabb
The Egyptologist (F) by Arthur Phillips
Roots: The Saga of an American Family (F) by Alex Haley
The View from Castle Rock (F) by Alice Munro
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (NF) by Robert Hughes

Other works by Colleen McCullough:

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (F)
Morgan’s Rum (F)
The Touch (F)
Tim (F)
On, Off (F)
The Ladies of Missalonghi (F)
Angel (F) 
A Creed for the Third Millenium (F)
An Indecent Obsession (F)
The Song of Troy (F)
The Courage and the Will (F) 
The Masters of Rome Series (F):

       The First Man in Rome  
       The Grass Crown
       Fortune’s Favorite
       Caesar’s Women
       Caesar
       The October Horse
       Antony and Cleopatra