Reviews with content warning for Child death - The Thorn Birds

This book was incredibly well written and that's the only reason why the rating is as high as it is. The descriptions of all the locations were amazing. I could feel the wind and rain of Drogheda against my skin. I could see the fires ripping through the plains. The mountains of sheep could've made their own country. Thick hordes of mosquitos pestering the occupants of the house during the summer months. I love how grounded the setting I felt throughout the book and I felt a strange sense of longing once I finished it. I've seen some say that they didn't like Justine when, even though she had her problems, she was the most normal one of the bunch and ended up having the only healthy relationship out of anyone in her entire family.

When she and Herr got together, I was genuinely happy for them.

However, that does not make up for the content.

I know some people will say that this book was a product of its time and I'm sure there's some argument to be made there, but Meggie and Ralph's relationship was disturbing.

The author set Meggie up to be the perfect victim for grooming and throughout the story, used the plot to isolate Meggie more and more. Meggie is barely 10 when they first meet. He is 28. She is emotionally neglected by both of her parents and is made to hold an enormous amount of responsibility at a young age. She is made to care for her siblings, even having to give up her own education when she is pre-pubescent. Her time in Catholic school under the abusive hands of the nuns beat he into awe of Catholicism. Although sometimes throughout the book she seems to question that, she holds her beliefs close to her heart. I'm sure some will claim that they didn't do anything until she was older (she was a breath away from 17 when they first kiss), but Ralph makes it clear throughout the book that he is hyper-focused on her for reasons he claims to not understand, but it's more the fact that he doesn't want to acknowledge them. Even Mary Carson, who dies before Meggie turns 17, chides Ralph on several occasions for his liking of Meggie. Nobody ever explicitly says that it's wrong for him to be liking a child. Mary dislikes his attention for Meggie because she wants him to herself. But every person who disapproves of the relationship, including Paddy, ends up dying before things start getting hot and heavy.

Meggie goes through so much tragedy that she clings to Ralph because he's the only consistently good thing in her life. Her parents see her infatuation with him and his with her and neither of them says anything until much later in the book. Fee doesn't comment until Meggie gave birth to Ralph's child almost a decade after their first kiss. Specialists in predators often say you should be wary of someone who wants to spend more time with your kids than you do and Ralph spent the majority of his time with Meggie. Even as he cheats the family out of their inheritance, he is hailed throughout the book as a noble man who sacrificed so much. He's a career-driven, power-hungry weirdo. When the time came in WWII to stand up against the Nazis, Ralph much preferred to stay with the status quo to maintain the status that SOLELY the money he stole from Clearys got him than to stand up for what was right.

If the book's purpose was to display how generational trauma spreads, it does a marvelous job at that. I also appreciated the realistic experiences in war. The excitement of young boys at the prospect of being the hero and getting on the battlefield and realizing you hadn't stepped onto a movie set. You can see parents' and grandparents' decisions trickle down throughout the children, having different effects. It's a testament to the failings of a traditional, conservative family structure because barely anyone is happy throughout this book at any time.

Meggie's relationship with Luke was especially disturbing. There are several detailed scenes of marital rape that are uncomfortable to read and the book does not acknowledge it as assault because Meggie doesn't know that it is. Her naivete and ignorance are frequently used against her throughout the book and it makes a woman who only knows how to love one man and that clouds all else.
If you want to see how grooming and manipulation work in slow motion and how people ignorant of the truths of life make horrible decisions, this book is an excellent case study.

Content Warnings

zezeki's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

chalkletters's review against another edition

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emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I picked up The Thorn Birds four years ago because it was mentioned in The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club. I devoured it over the course of a week in a holiday cottage, and it packed an enormous emotional punch. I've been looking forward to rereading it ever since, which might seem odd because almost nothing nice happens in the entire 54-year span of the novel's plot.

The Thorn Birds appeals to the part of me that signed up to take a module on Settler Identity: Fictions of Oz/Nz at university; it starts out as a story about coming to a new place and trying to make a life there. All the characters' lives are limited in some way - by class, by money, by gender. It's not even as if the characters band together to overcome these problems, because most of the relationships in the book are strained to some degree.

Colleen McCullough makes these tragedies cathartic, rather than depressing. The characters and their emotions feel incredibly well-observed and realistic. The prose has just the right balance between descriptions, interior thoughts, action and dialogue. Specific scenes linger in the memory so that, on rereading, I found myself recalling them just before they happened and was able to see the foreshadowing which I missed when I didn't know what was coming. Even though these events no longer came as a surprise, they were still able to bring on a storm of tears.

Reading this so close after Brideshead Revisited, it struck me that Colleen McCullough does a better job at making Catholicism understandable to someone who wasn't brought up with it than Evelyn Waugh does, as well as offering a more sympathetic portrayal.

Though I'm not a reader who loves or goes looking for tragedy, The Thorn Birds is such an incredibly satisfying novel that I know I'll return to it again and again.

Content Warnings

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