Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles.
For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain … Or so says the legend. Most fiction readers who were over the age of 16 in probably remember the No. Meggie is the mirror in which I'm forced to view my mortality". A theme that never got off the ground: Early in this novel, when Meggie was a small child - in school with the nuns- she became friends with a little black girl.
Racial tensions between the families grew out of injustice when Meggie had lice in her hair. We soon move into part II of the novel. All we learned was the black family had to 'move'.
I thought we'd see more 'racial' injustice stories - but this novel never followed that path. One of my favorite characters was Frank The 'worsening psychosis' news comes with no background story. I was left hanging 'too' long. Frank was often in my thoughts I wanted more of him. His love for his mother, Fee, and only sister Meggie reminded me of 'what's right' in life. But I wanted more of 'that' too- Yet so much tragedy-no Peace Frank's father - Paddy - while growing up.
Mary Carson - sister of Paddy, Meggie's father -was one hell of a nice lady -- ha!!!! A narcissistic snake! My dad died young. I'm not sure I find that sentence comforting 'at all'! Justine- As unfair as I felt she was 'emotionally' loved by her mother- Meggie I could go on and on and on It's filled with drama, tabu themes, forbidden love, angst, secrets, love, family, marriage, illness, death, loyalty, money, religion, sex, - heartbreaking and affirmative Thanks for all the - many friends here who encouraged me to read this!!
I'm thrilled I did!!! View all 80 comments. Jul 30, Crumb rated it it was amazing. This might sound strange, but I crave a book that is going to ruin me for all other novels to come. And this was it! Something in my greedy little reader paws, wants a book that is going to destroy me. Wreak havoc upon me. Do you know what I am talking about?
Well, maybe you don't. This story lifted my heart and made my soul come alive. I felt as if the characters ingratiated the I would give this all the stars in the sky if I could. I felt as if the characters ingratiated themselves to such an extent in my very being, that I had sensations of them dancing upon my soul. With that being said, there is something that you must know and accept before beginning this novel. These events would never, could never, happen in real life.
Therefore, just go with it. Enjoy the story. Suspend belief. Do whatever you need to do.. This is a story you will never forget. It's memories will be permanently imprinted on my heart forever. Why are you still reading this review? I cannot stand by and be silent, and I certainly cannot and will not endorse that point of view. In fact, I think it is horrific. If you are interested in finding out more information, you can view this article that a fellow GR friend shared with me.
View all comments. Jul 09, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: historical , 20th-century , fiction , australia , romance. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine.
And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain Or so says the legend. Set primarily on Drogheda—a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland—the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years to The novel is the best selling book in Australian history, and has sold over 33 million copies worldwide.
Meghann "Meggie" Cleary, a four-year-old girl living in New Zealand in the early twentieth century, is the only daughter of Paddy, an Irish farm labourer and Fee, his harassed but aristocratic wife. Meggie is a beautiful child with curly red-gold hair but receives little coddling and must struggle to hold her own.
Her favourite brother is the eldest, Frank, a rebellious young man who is unwillingly preparing himself for the blacksmith's trade. He is much shorter than his other brothers, but very strong.
Unlike the other Clearys, he has black hair and eyes, believed to be inherited from his Maori great-great-grandmother. View all 6 comments. Sep 29, Fabian rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites. Her daughter Meggie, the protagonist until her daughter takes the helm, also suffers her mother's character flaws Her priest Ralph, in what is the central love story, chooses God over his heart.
There are only 19 chapters in this massive chronology and many events occur, mostly random and sometimes poetic, but they never fail to surprise. There are acts of stupidity and compassion. People repress many feelings, more for personal convictions than for social or familial obligations we seldom don't visit in books such as these!
Ralph is an idiot for causing so much pain to both he and his love. What does that say about organized religion and the crimson-clothed of the almighty Vatican?
They are, however, extremely hard workers and this pays off well. There are many morals, many moments of euphoria, and even slight by today's standards snippets of hot erotica! You pretty much stand witness to one of the most complex yet endearing pieces of literature. Highlights: 1 the death of one of the Cleary boy's via warthog asphyxiation immediately following the death of his father via fiery "holocaust. Such sprawls indicate that life can expand from its moldy origins to experience infinite possiblities, arrive at distal ends.
I recommend this book for someone not afraid to having a two-three week relationship with a soap opera that, unlike those on t. The reader only experiences the latter. View all 15 comments. Oh my fucking God. This book. I was standing in the kitchen this morning angrily chopping veg and I couldn't work out why, then I realised, it was this book just making me irrationally angry, when I wasn't even reading it! Tragedies within the first 50 pages, let's list them.
She gets a lovely doll! She gets sent to school at last! It's ok she makes an awesome friend! She realllly wants Oh my fucking God. She realllly wants a blue teaset. I'm allowed to go to Church with the others! My parents don't love me but my brother does.
That was basically the whole book, over and over again. There was some shit about how priests should be allowed to marry because what is God if not Love and some other stuff about being married to the land and where babies come from.
At one point they meet the priest, he is like "fuck your hair is sexy darlin'" ignoring the fact she is Nine. He lusts after her for the rest of the book but he is Married to God and the author takes pains to mention how he can never get it up, several times. Apart from about 4 days in a honeymoon hotel bareback where he never again considers he could have made her pregnant, even when being faced with his own son for several hours a day for 10 years.
Nobody ever says "fuck man he looks just like you," and never once does he think "You know she left her husband right close to when this kid was conceived right about the time of those 4 days in a honeymoon hotel" Oh man I'm not going to go into it.
Don't read it. View all 51 comments. Jul 15, Maureen rated it it was amazing. This was a reread for me and just as enjoyable the second time around! View all 49 comments. Sep 27, Shannon rated it it was amazing Shelves: australian-women-writers , classics , , favourite , family-saga , historical-fiction. I've wanted to read this book for years, but I'm glad I waited till I was at a stage in my life when I might appreciate it the most though it wasn't deliberate.
I didn't know anything about the story before I started except that it's a classic Australian novel, epic in scope, and was made into a mini-series or something starring Rachel Ward years ago. I like not knowing much about books before I read them, though: it leaves you wide-open for the story to be told, and absorbed. This is indeed an I've wanted to read this book for years, but I'm glad I waited till I was at a stage in my life when I might appreciate it the most though it wasn't deliberate.
This is indeed an epic book. It spans three generations of the Cleary family, focusing mostly on Meggie. Even by Australian standards, it's a big farm: , acres, 80 miles across at its widest point, home to over , merino sheep. The Clearys, who had been poor farmhands in NZ, fall in love with Drogheda and learn the ways of the land, the climate, the weather, the animals, pretty quickly.
The book is divided up into 7 sections titled Meggie ; Ralph ; Paddy ; Luke ; Fee ; Dane ; and Justine These provide a slight focus, but the only characters who really dominate the story are Meggie, Ralph - the Catholic priest who falls in love with her - and Justine, Meggie's daughter by Luke.
There is definitely tragedy in this book, but I never once found it depressing. It is similar in its structure to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , but completely different, and successful in a way the latter book was not for me : The Thorn Birds made me care. Each character is so beautifully rendered, as if they were indeed living people whose memories were captured by a light, non-judgemental hand.
Every character evoked strong feelings in me, which changed as the characters changed. Luke, for instance, I wanted to throttle and ended up pitying. Meggie, in her naivete, was at times exasperating, yet she learned and I was proud of her for that - then angry, for the way she set Dane above Justine.
Sometimes I absolutely hated Ralph and wanted to smack him; at other times I felt so deeply for him and his emotional turmoil. I can't get over how well written this book is. It is simply told, in an omniscient third-person voice, only sometimes, when needed, delving in deeper into the hearts and minds of the main characters to reveal their thoughts and feelings. The clashing perceptions people have are accurately portrayed, the poor judgements, bad decisions, mistakes - all so life-like, so real.
Inferences, connections and insights can be deduced from hints in the story, but McCullough leaves a lot for the reader to realise on their own. And behind it all, like a glorious backdrop, the gorgeous landscape, so vivid and true. History and politics are there also: two world wars, the Depression, the Great Drought that ended when WWII ended, everything from clothing to attitudes to cars, as well as changing Australian slang, attitudes, the quirks - most of it slipping in unobtrusively, at other times pivotal to the plot.
That there is a plot is undeniable: that it is noticeable, I doubt very much. I don't like to predict stories anyway - the only ones I do that to are unavoidable, like Steven Seagal movies - but there was very little in this book that I could have predicted had I tried.
Maybe I'm just out of practice, but there was no sense of an author dictating or pushing the characters towards certain goals. A few things I could see coming, like Dane turning out just like his father, but even then it felt completely natural, not as though McCullough was manipulating the story.
It seems funny, reading a book of extreme heat, drought, flies, fire, endless silvery grass while outside it's freezing, snowing, bleak. But I was utterly transported, and the only thing that jarred my pleasure was the strangeness of seeing American spelling and a couple of changed words amidst the Australian slang.
Why, for instance, change "nappy" to "diaper" while leaving "mum" for "mom"? As an aside, in general I really hate it when books from the UK and Australia, for instance, must undergo an Americanisation before being published in North America, whereas when books by US authors are published in Australia it's with the American spelling and all. That just doesn't seem fair! It seems pretty insulting to the Americans I've talked to, actually, but also patronising to us.
I think, though, regardless of whose decision that was, McCullough was writing to an international audience. She never intended this book to stagnate in Australia, as many works do which are "too difficult to understand" in other countries. She doesn't talk about crutching the dags on the sheep without explaining what crutching means and what dags are, or that the big lizards are called goannas and rabbits were introduced to Australia so that it would look a little more like England for the homesick settler - I know all this, but it was still interesting to read about it.
If you're interested in reading about Australia or just epic stories in general , this is a great book to start with.
It's not even out-of-date, things change so slowly! Just picture stockmen flying helicopters around herds of cattle instead of riding, their properties are so humungous.
The droughts are still there, the floods, the flies, the fires, the vernacular - though the Catholics have almost disappeared. The religion aspect of the novel is equally fascinating, and handled diplomatically as well. It is a book about ordinary people living ordinary lives, and sometimes deliberately causing themselves pain: hence the reference to the thorn bird, which pierces its breast on a rose thorn as it sings, and dies.
View all 21 comments. Oct 02, Fergus rated it it was amazing. Books can drive you into irrational behaviour. This book turned me into a Catholic convert. No joke. I MUST be crazy, right? Actually, no At times that autumn - the only time it ever happened to me - I felt almost suicidal. I was at the proverbial end of my rope Then I read this calamitous set of hopeless misadventures set in the Australian outback.
It gripped me till the end. And this job was it. So what was the problem? Well, I worked in an Automated Supply Cell. This job necessitated following computer orders partly written in machine language remember the pre-desktop-computer days?
But he woulda known better. I needed H-E-L-P!!! So, there I was, up crap creek without a paddle, and on my coffee breaks I poured my soul into The Thorn Birds. I guess misery really DOES love company.
Straight - no chaser, as Thelonius Monk once said. The same as my newly-restored Faith - with all of its faults and blemishes and, yes! Believe it, or NOT. View all 37 comments. In a down reading year, an epic family saga was just what I needed to push away the reading doldrums.
Normally, a five star read would merit a long review depicting characters, place, time, and the author's luscious prose. The Thorn Birds had all of this and was hauntingly beautiful. Yet, despite the story of the Cleary family and their parish priest being a much needed tonic for me, I am omitting my long review for now. Watch options. Storyline Edit. This mini series covers 60 years in the lives of the Cleary family, brought from New Zealand to Australia to run their aunt Mary Carson's ranch.
The story centers on their daughter, Meggie, and her love for the family's priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart. Meggie tries to forget Ralph by marrying dashing stockman Luke O'Neill, but she and Ralph are soon reunited, with tragic consequences for them both.
Love unattainable. Forbidden forever. Did you know Edit. Trivia Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown fell in love on the set. They were married in and have three children.
Goofs The name of the farm is mispronounced. It is named after the Irish town Drogheda. The American cast did not know that 'gh' in Irish is pronounced like an 'h' in English. The cast said Drow-Geeda whereas the proper pronunciation is Dro-huh-duh, where Dro is pronounced like in "drop". Quotes Ralph de Bricassart : [telling the legend of the thorn bird to Meggie] There's a story User reviews 73 Review. Top review.
Thorn Birds takes its title — and many of its themes — from a mythical bird that searches its entire life for a thorn tree. As big a character as any in her books, Colleen McCullough was working as a scientist at Yale when she decided to write novels in her spare time. Eager to match her income to that of her male colleagues, McCullough polled Yale students on what they looked for in a good story. She took their answers — romance, character, and plot — added her native Australia as the setting, and dreamed up The Thorn Birds.
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