The Thorn Birds
Now, 25 years after it first took the world by storm, Colleen McCullough?s sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback returns to enthrall a new generation. As powerful, moving, and unforgettable as when it originally appeared, it remains a monumental literary achievement -- a landmark novel to be read . . . and read again!
The Thorn Birds Accessories
 The Thorn Birds
The Thorn Birds Collector's Edition (The Thorn Birds / The Thorn Birds 2 - The Missing Years)
Gone With the Wind
Gone with the Wind
Tim
Morgan's Run
Shattered Love: A Memoir
Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind"
The Thorn Birds 2 - The Missing Years
Rebecca
The Thorn Birds Reviews
I can't put my finger on precisely what made me feel this way, but perhaps it was the unrealistic and weak dialogue that finally did me in. I truly felt the Cleary family hardships, their bitterness and secrets. Or perhaps Father Ralph's somewhat obsessive feelings towards the young Meggie made me feel uncomfortable. However, after awhile I found it somewhat outdated. I felt connected to the characters and thought the author's ability to capture both time and place was supurb; she really made the Australian Outback come alive. Regardless, despite its cult-like status, I simply can't recommend this one. I went into this book knowing its a beloved classic therefore I really wanted to love it; for the first half of the book I really did.
Needless to say, this is my all-time favorite book, but more than that, it is a life-changing experience for the reader who can appreciate the detail of Ms. From Ms. Her agonies, her triumphs, her strength, and, most of all, her capacity to love, left an impression on my young spirit that have only grown more intense with the passing years. "The Thorn Birds" is truly one of the greatest works of literature ever written, the kind of masterpiece that every artist dreams of producing just once in a lifetime.
I found myself resenting the interruptions of my real life when I first read it, at the age of 12, in 1978.
Meggie Cleary is the character with whom I have identified my entire adult life, never mind the fact that I am a gay man living sixty years later and half a world away from her.
In this book, I discovered my own emotional range, which was far greater than I had ever known.
It transports the reader into another time and place so completely and effortlessly that it is virtually impossible to put the book down.
Colleen McCollough's "The Thorn Birds" is more than just a beautifully written epic.
Perhaps because I first read it at such a vitally impressionable age and I should mention that I have read and re-read the book more than twenty times in the 30 years that have passed since then "The Thorn Birds" came to represent my coming-of-age story.
McCollough's research, the elegance of her prose, the depth and humanity of her characters.
McCollough I learned about the process of menstruation, experiencing with Meggie her fear and awe as her body changed and grew.
Luke O'Neil, Paddy, Fee, Justine, even Mrs. I totally agree. I love reading classics, plays, all kinds of things. You can almost see the landscape, feel the heat, hear the sheep. I am a reader. The story is wonderful, more then just a love story.
Smith the housekeeper are such well developed characters with their own sorrows and joys. Yet, when people ask me what my *all time* favorite is, it is The Thorn Birds. I can't describe it, it is just SO GOOD. There is a web of amazingly rich characters that you end up caring about. Mary Carson is one of the best characters in the story, yet she is only in a fraction of the book. Another reviewer mentioned how it transports you to Australia. Honestly, whenever I need a pick me up because my own life is just too stressful and I want to escape, this is the first book I go too. When telling people about it, it seems kind of like a trashy novel, not real "literature".
It can't be; there must be some mistake. Down one pathnope, better find another. In the end Drogheda will be no more and we find Meggie resigned to this fate. No, there is no mistake. Her best character is the villainess, Mary Carson, whose decisions shape the book and whose ghost haunts it throughout. But instead of high tragedy, McCullough gives us a resigned Meggie and a Ralph who pines away even as he climbs the ladder of Catholic success. There are two things that keep The Thorn Birds from being a great book.
We see him throughout the book stroking his various cats, as a benign Goldfinger. The first is that it lacks the dramatic conclusion of great drama. When he does come back to Dongheha he is but a shell of his former self and spends his time puttering in the garden. The second limiting factor in the book is the meandering plot.
Maybe it is a bit of realism, that in post WW II Australia the rabbit population was wiped out by myxomatosis, but is it really necessary to include this particular fact in the book. But realize before you do that you are about to descend in something akin to Dante's Infernoand don't compare it to War and Peace. It's only a novel. The Thorn Birds is, at bottom, a book for women. The one central unifying theme is the relationship between Meggie and Father Ralph.
The Hunchback of Norte Dame ends with Quasimodo seeing the two great loves of his life die within moments, one by his own hand. Does all of this mean that the book is not worth reading. . Then the book seems to be about Fee and Paddy, but that line fizzles out too. Meggie and Cardinal Ralph nonchalantly go to bed together and the moment passes and the story moves on. The place where the climax should have come to an end is at the point when Ralph, now Cardinal di Bricassart, comes to Drogheda and meets Dane. While perhaps not on a par with Dickens' Madame Defarge, she exudes evil; even her death is grotesque.
And then there is Ralph, of course, the combination of perfect man and perfect priest. In Gone With the Wind (the movie anyway) we find Scarlett holding the land between her fingers, looking upward and uttering the words, "Tomorrow is another day." But McCullough gives us no such hope. In fairness to McCullough, it is not as though she doesn't warn us.
Of course not. We go back and read the passage again. The title, is taken from a bird that impales itself on a thorn and sings until it dies. Read it.
. It is all imaginary. Enjoy it as best you can. And them we calm down. This is a book about suffering and death and religion. . McCullough teases us by saying that Anne and Luddie, the only two other people who know it, are coming to Drogheda as well.
We cry out in horror: WHY, COLLEEN, WHY THIS. McCullough does not seem to know where she is going with this book. It is a book much like Thackery's Vanity Fair, a "book without a hero," and while Meggie bears some resemblance to Becky Sharp, she falls far short of the scheming self-interest of the latter character.
Fee and Meggie know the truth but will not tell him. Its central themes of love, forbidden and otherwise, and psychological self-analysis resonate with them. The deaths far exceed the births and of the five births in the Cleary family, two die, one is maimed for life, one is psychologically warped and only one (Jims) has anything like a normal life. But what utterly destroys the book is the death that occurs towards the end.
The hot-tempered Frank is unlike the other Cleary boys and we soon learn why. WHY NOT BOB OR JIMS OR FEE WHO WOULD WELCOME DEATH. It isn't real. Of the two marriages, one is a disaster that ends in a de facto divorce and the other, at the end of the book, is McCullough's lame attempt at a happy ending. McCullough's men, by comparison are mere representations: The perfect priest, the Australian sheep grazier, Frank, the angry young man, the brothers, as alike as peas in a pod, Paddy, the accepting father, Luke, the rough, ambitious personification of Gordon Gekko, and Dane, the perfect embodiment of male beauty. When we first read it we are stunned.
It presents aspects of lifeNew Zealand, the Australian outback, the inner chambers of the Holy Seethat none of us are likely to experience. It is, to use a trite expression, "a damn good read." Women will love it; men will at least enjoy parts of it. Rather than compare it to Gone with the Wind, a more fitting comparison would be to the bible, specifically the Old Testament. Reading it is like wandering through a maze. Other scenes vie for this place in the book without much success.
None of the Cleary boys get marriedbecause they are shy around girls, or more likely because they have some sense of the fate that marriage would have in store for them. But what happens. For example, the book begins with the conflict between Fee, her son Frank and her husband Paddy. But where does this plot line go. McCullough draws her womenFee, Meggie, and Justinewith a clear and sharp brush. WHY MUST IT BE THIS. And we go on to finish the book.
The fire matches the biblical flood, as does the killing of animalssheep by the tens of thousands and rabbits by the millions. Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds is one of the most popular books written in recent years, but it is not a great book, a classic novel. Why does McCullough have to kill the bunnies. The God of Colleen McCullough is clearly God the Father, an avenging God who punishes and kills relentlesslywho tortures Job much as a small boy would pull the legs off a frog to see what happens. Frank leaves to become a boxer and the next thing we know McCullough has him in prison for 30 years. The Guardian called it, "Australia's answer to Gone With the Wind," and it certainly has the epic sweep of that book and, in Meggie Cleary, a character to rival Scarlett O'Hara in iron-willed determination and love for the land.
The human death toll in the book is what grieves us the most. It is stupid and senseless and comes upon us suddenly, like the deaths of the children in Jude the Obscure, who hang themselves, leaving behind the pathetic note, "We are too many." But Hardy paid for the unrelenting negativism in his novels (poor Tess)., and was so pilloried that he turned to poetry in his latter years. Even Cardinal Vittorio Scarbanza di Conti-Verchese is a mere stereotype of the kind of cardinal that controlled the Catholic Church in those days. This is life for Mcullough, to paraphrase Hobbes, "Nasty, Long and Brutish." But we have been warned and after all one does not read Shakesepeare's tragedies expecting a happy ending. Finally, the book ends without hope.
This book may raise a few eyebrows today with what has been going on in the church. Read this book several years ago and enjoyed it immensly. A young woman falls in love with a kindly young priest and gradually gets him to fall in love with her.
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