The Thorn Birds
by Colleen McCullough
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Book Reviews of The Thorn Birds
Book Review: Warning: this novel may be dangerous to diabetics
Summary: 2 Stars
I sat down to read about this after hearing about it for years, and I want my week back. It only took that long because I had to push myself to finish it.
SPOILERS AHEAD: Meggie and Father Ralph (who everyone always seems to refer to as Ralph de Bricassart, even when they're talking to him) meet when he is twenty-six and Meggie is...ten. She speaks, acts and thinks like a 5-year-old, though. As the years go by, Father Ralph de Bricassart becomes sort of a father figure to little Meggie, and she develops a girlish crush on him. As Meggie is also "developing a very feminine figure," Ralph comes to love her in return but realizes that their love can never be. They discuss this in approximately fifteen thousand "Don't love me, my darling, for I love you but you know our love is forbidden and can never be" conversations throughout the book. Finally, after years of smothering their passion, they do it. In a really very boring scene that's all inner ruminating and blurred descriptions. And wouldn't ya know it, she gets pregnant. Ralph de Bricassart realizes (again) that their love can never be, and leaves. Meggie has his baby, and capers about gleefully that she's "stolen" something back from God. But wouldn't ya know it, the kid (who's as angelic and one-dimensional a boy I've ever encountered in literature) decides to be a priest. So she sends him to Father Ralph de Bricassart for training, who--get this--is so totally brain dead that IT NEVER ONCE OCCURS TO HIM THAT THIS MIGHT BE HIS CHILD!!!!!!! Apparently arithmetic is not a compulsory part of training for the priesthood; this guy also misses an incredibly broad hint from Meggie, when even the other priests figure it out. The Big Secret finally does come out (again in a very brief, anticlimactic scene) toward the end, but by then we're too busy skimming to really care.
All this leaves out a great many things--including immortal dialogue that makes Meggie sound perpetually ten years old ("I'll tell you something else about your roses, Ralph de Bricassart--they've got nasty, hooky thorns!"), endless, heavyhanded symbolism (ashes of roses, thorn birds...we get it! we get it!), some dumb subplot concerning a brother who is absent for 90% of the book, and one of the most unintentionally hilarious "tragic" scenes I've ever read (death by pig). Yet the Ralph-and-Meggie storyline really is the only major thing going on. And we never really get to see what it is that draws these two people together. I was expecting other subplots and development of other characters, and this never really happened. Many of the other relationships were sketchy and/or very confusing: Meggie's cruel judgment of her daughter Justine as a "monster" and a "b* tch," for example, seemed to have no basis. The last third or so involves Meggie making peace with her mother and daughter, and it just doesn't matter. The quick "the end" wrap-up would have been an even greater letdown if I'd still cared by that point. Even the most developed characters are flat and lifeless, and thoroughly unlikable. Scarlett O'Hara was selfish, but she was fun; these people are selfish and boring. Sickly-sweet quasi-romantic trash.
Book Review: A Sentimental and Naive Lover
Summary: 3 Stars
I just now finished reading this book. In fact I got this book only after seeing my uncle reading CM's Historical Ceaser & Rome related books.
Right at the start I knew that this book is meant to be for women. The way 4 year old Maggie Cleary is described, u immediately come to know that she is different in a way women in our Indian Hindi movies are portrayed, extremely sensitive, and one who suffers all pain and never expresses it or complaints about it. Right at the start you know that it's full of women's inner feeling. And specially feeling that very few of them is capable of entertaining lest they want to be labeled as a sentimental fool. But yet they are very rare, touching and agonizing feeling.
Right at start you also come to know that this is story about life and its philosophy because you never know enough of life unless you are on the wrong side of life that is when you have a life that is devoid of everything...a sufferers life, a life of poverty. And while reading this book all those affluent and rich people get a chance to live proxy life of a poor through Cleary family. But one thing different in this Cleary family is that this is story of poor people who contrary to general expectation don't buckle under hardship of poverty and loose all sense of dignity and finery of life's behaviors and emotions and its feeling, but stick to them and are more admirable and lovable. And emerge out as people, who give in more to such feeling in hardship when it truly required to be shown.
But its written in Mills & Boon style...full of sweet clichéd words and diabetic romanticism (though that is how most people love to feel and live and suffer for love) though some of the description and dialogues related to morality and ambivalent desires of hearts and some love making scenes are the one that make this book worth reading. Above all it's the pain author has inflected on its characters knowingly expectedly, unknowingly and unexpectedly that makes a reader keep on turning pages of this bulky book.
But after reading this book I did realize that someone like me who has lived in poverty and has indulged in love luxuriantly would truly admire this book. For the pain you get being good and poor is something you really cherish and sometimes you want more of it as a nihilist does. It goes for sacrifice too, the more deeply and acutely u feel love and are denied of it, the more of that love you want. For what is love if you can not endure separation and pain and what is life if you can not suffer its hardship and maintain your dignity?
I think being a semi historical author now CM must be feeling odd while acknowledging this book and she must have written this when she herself must have suffered bout of romantic delusions and eventually would have decided to paint her own feeling in sweeping epic saga spanning three generations and hundred years. And she has been successful in doing so.
Book Review: A Gripping Story
Summary: 5 Stars
The Thorn Birds is a gripping love story involving two characters that are never able to claim their love for each other. Meggie Cleary and Father Ralph have deep feelings for one another but they are unable to show these feelings because Father Ralph is unable to be involved with a girl in that manner due to his career. The novel is about the life of three generations in the Cleary family. Mainly the novel focuses on the passion between Ralph and Meggie. It shows the enternal heartbreak that can come of loving the unlovable. Along with the heartbreak that Meggie deals with on a daily basis, there are also tramas in her everyday life that keep her spinning in every direction. Yet, somehow she is able to continue on in her life.Meggie is a strong character and from reading this book, I can relate to her struggles. She was just a child when she was thrown into the adult world and was expected to adjust. Throughout the book the reader is able to share her feelings, whether they may be good or bad. Meggie has many strengths in her life. She is able to cope with almost anything that is thrown at her. When she was only a teenager, she held the responsibility of caring for her baby brother because her mother was much to busy to pay any attention to him. Meggie's main weakness is her ever-growing love for Father Ralph. She is unable to let her love for him die, therefore causing her great pain.
Colleen McCullough uses the title The Thorn Birds for a very specific purpose I think. A thorn bird is a symbol of someone who is jabbed many times with problems and dilemmas constantly, but yet is able to come out on top. The bird is singing and gets stuck with a thorn. The bird does not stop singing, but instead sings whole-heartedly until it's dying breath. This is just like Meggie and the other characters in the novel. They get problems upon problems piled on them, but they never complain about any of it. They silently work their way through it accepting any consequences that may come along with it. The live like the thorn birds by never complaining about the bad in their lives, but only working to make it better and dying knowing that there was not much more that could be done.
I really enjoyed this book. I was so interesting that I just couldn't stop reading it. It was a book that I just couldn't put it down. It takes a lot for me to like a book, but this is just one of the books that within the first chapter I loved it. I hope that other people were able to enjoy it as much as I did. I recommend it to anyone looking to read a good book.
Book Review: 3.5 stars
Summary: 3 Stars
This is my kind of book: an epic family saga with a strong sense of place. I hate to give it only three stars, but I've had to conclude that while it has its strengths, it doesn't live up to what it could have been.
The Thorn Birds starts off excellently, detailing the day-to-day life of a family struggling to get by in early twentieth century New Zealand. It's well-written, it feels very realistic, and there's a strong sense of place. There's believable conflict among the family members without any of them being unsympathetic. There's an interesting and unflinching look at the effects of strict gender roles on women's lives: something we don't see in most historical fiction, which tends to feature the elite rather than regular folks. (I'll read about the regular folks, any day, and McCullough does it well.) When the family picks up and moves to Australia, I was still enthralled. I loved the descriptions of life in the Outback and was drawn into the family's story.
Somewhere along the way though, things went wrong. The characters' personalities and relationships began to lose credibility with me; several times I just couldn't swallow that people in these situations would relate to each other the way they do. Meggie's relationships with both her mother and her daughter felt especially bizarre, full of contrived antagonism far beyond what one would expect. (In Justine's case, evidently she dislikes Meggie from birth. Ooookay.) Meanwhile, some of the more colorful personalities, such as Frank and Luke, fall off the face of the earth, while the brothers lose what personality they once had and slowly merge into one person, as if McCullough changed her mind about how many brothers the story required but couldn't be bothered to get rid of the extras. As for the romance between Meggie and Ralph, while at first it raised some interesting questions, it never captured my emotions and became increasingly repetitive.
Which is not to say that this is an awful book, because it isn't. It's well-written and the thematics are strong. The sense of place persists throughout, and it's fascinating to see how the coming of new technology affects the Outback. The main characters are decently well-developed, and while the book is long, the plot remains interesting throughout. I finished it in a few days. Still, if you have not yet read the classic historical epics, like Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits or Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, I'd recommend going with those first.
Book Review: A timeless story of love, ambition, and struggle!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a truly a great and classic novel. I do not bestow these oft-overused adjectives lightly. This is a story of deep, rich, and forbidden love, betrayal, tragedy, and ambition. This is a truly wonderful story set primarily in Australia, circa 1915 and then spanning several generations to the post World War II era. McCullough writes a sprawling story which primarily centers on the forbidden love between an extraordinary woman and a good but ambitious priest.This is the story of the Cleary family, originally from Ireland, who emigrate first to New Zealand, and early on, to Australia. The young Cleary daughter, Meggie, falls in love with the local Catholic priest, Ralph de Briccasart, who is a good and ambitious man who certainly does nothing to encourage this love, but who certainly returns it as he regards Meggie as the daughter he can never have. As Meggie matures, he comes to regard her in a more romantic way. A great struggle arises between this love on the one hand ("the forbidden rose") and his ambition to become a Cardinal or perhaps more, on the other.
There is much, much, more to the story than this, however. The novel transports the reader to Australia, and makes that country a real place to those of us who have never been there. This is also the story of the struggles of the Cleary family, as they battle with, and come to love, the rich outback country of Australia. This is an extraordinarily authentic and moving story that any review (or at least this one) can only fail to do justice.
McCullough's prose is simply outstanding, and her characters crackle with realism--they become utterly real people and the reader will become swept away with this wonderful story. The storyline never drags, and at no point does this novel ever fail to completely capture the reader's attention. This novel is not only a classic; it is a ripping good read! If you have not yet enjoyed this novel, you are in for a wonderful reading experience.