the thorn birds by colleen mccullough summary

I devoured The Thorn Birds originally because I fell in love with Drogheda, not the sheep station's house with its inappropriate European garden and vulgar furniture, but the 250,000 acres of black soil plains in north-western New South Wales. No opportunity to indulge in an excess of feminine fantasy is resisted by McCullough as Meggie writhes in silent agony, struggling to give birth to another man's child, Archbishop Ralph de Bricassart, Papal Legate, miraculously shows up, 'a purple grosgrain sash about his waist', for no better reason than that he was worried about his 'torn and beaten Meggie'. As in any Georgette Heyer or Barbara Cartland novel, the distant father figure nurtures a hidden and undying passion for the needy daughter figure, which is expressed only in the faintest tremor of hand or lip, and does not burgeon into erection until she has suffered anguish and violation (and they are together at a lesser-known tourist spot). The seducing daughter is almost as improbable: Titian hair, unblemished skin, slender body and soul-deep innocence. Father, bishop, archbishop, finally cardinal, Ralph de Bricassart, with his widow's peak, electric blue eyes, hairless, athletic body, ineffable grace and penchant for sports cars, is the least probable version of the father figure ever to appear in chick lit. Though Maeve Binchy has treated the plot of The Thorn Birds seriously in her introduction to the 30th anniversary edition, the novel is simply a reworking of the staple theme of women's romantic fiction - the seduction by the daughter of the almighty father. But then a convent-educated girl would not have made the mistake of assuming that a secular priest had taken a vow of poverty, as McCullough does. As far as the average convent-educated girl is concerned, 'attractive priest' is an oxymoron.

The temptation to answer 'Yes, Father! You, Father!' was all but overwhelming. The main plot of The Thorn Birds has always struck me as absurdly implausible, probably because I can remember too clearly the time a priest asked me in the confessional if my impure thoughts involved any particular person.

Rereading it now, the same thing happens: I read on hungrily wanting more, but not of the story of forbidden love between damsel and cleric. When the clatter of the nightingales (the original thorn birds) gave way to the pre-dawn chorus, I was still reading, utterly engrossed in the best bad book I had ever read.

Having nothing else with which to read myself to sleep, I took it to bed with me.

I n 1978, a guest at my little house in the Tuscan hills left behind a paperback copy of Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds.

The thorn birds by colleen mccullough summary