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Tarfumes.com - The Thorn Birds
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List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $7.99
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Avon
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823
EAN: 9780380018178
ISBN: 0380018179
Label: Avon
Manufacturer: Avon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 692
Publication Date: 1979-06-01
Publisher: Avon
Studio: Avon
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Editorial Reviews:
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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!
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Wanted to love this book but felt it too outdated...
Comment: 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. 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. I truly felt the Cleary family hardships, their bitterness and secrets. However, after awhile I found it somewhat outdated. 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. Or perhaps Father Ralph's somewhat obsessive feelings towards the young Meggie made me feel uncomfortable. Regardless, despite its cult-like status, I simply can't recommend this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A modern classic to rival "Gone With the Wind"
Comment: Colleen McCollough's "The Thorn Birds" is more than just a beautifully written epic. It transports the reader into another time and place so completely and effortlessly that it is virtually impossible to put the book down. I found myself resenting the interruptions of my real life when I first read it, at the age of 12, in 1978. From Ms. McCollough I learned about the process of menstruation, experiencing with Meggie her fear and awe as her body changed and grew. In this book, I discovered my own emotional range, which was far greater than I had ever known. 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. 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. 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. 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. McCollough's research, the elegance of her prose, the depth and humanity of her characters. "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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My all time favorite novel.
Comment:
I am a reader. I love reading classics, plays, all kinds of things. Yet, when people ask me what my *all time* favorite is, it is The Thorn Birds. When telling people about it, it seems kind of like a trashy novel, not real "literature". I can't describe it, it is just SO GOOD. The story is wonderful, more then just a love story. 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. Luke O'Neil, Paddy, Fee, Justine, even Mrs. Smith the housekeeper are such well developed characters with their own sorrows and joys.
Another reviewer mentioned how it transports you to Australia. I totally agree. You can almost see the landscape, feel the heat, hear the sheep...
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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Thorn Birds: A Tragic and Flawed Novel
Comment: 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. 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. 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.
There are two things that keep The Thorn Birds from being a great book. The first is that it lacks the dramatic conclusion of great drama. The Hunchback of Norte Dame ends with Quasimodo seeing the two great loves of his life die within moments, one by his own hand. 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. Fee and Meggie know the truth but will not tell him. McCullough teases us by saying that Anne and Luddie, the only two other people who know it, are coming to Drogheda as well. But what happens? Meggie and Cardinal Ralph nonchalantly go to bed together and the moment passes and the story moves on. Other scenes vie for this place in the book without much success.
The Thorn Birds is, at bottom, a book for women. Its central themes of love, forbidden and otherwise, and psychological self-analysis resonate with them. McCullough draws her women--Fee, Meggie, and Justine--with a clear and sharp brush. Her best character is the villainess, Mary Carson, whose decisions shape the book and whose ghost haunts it throughout. While perhaps not on a par with Dickens' Madame Defarge, she exudes evil; even her death is grotesque. 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. Even Cardinal Vittorio Scarbanza di Conti-Verchese is a mere stereotype of the kind of cardinal that controlled the Catholic Church in those days. We see him throughout the book stroking his various cats, as a benign Goldfinger. And then there is Ralph, of course, the combination of perfect man and perfect priest.
This is a book about suffering and death and religion. Rather than compare it to Gone with the Wind, a more fitting comparison would be to the bible, specifically the Old Testament. The God of Colleen McCullough is clearly God the Father, an avenging God who punishes and kills relentlessly--who tortures Job much as a small boy would pull the legs off a frog to see what happens. The fire matches the biblical flood, as does the killing of animals--sheep by the tens of thousands and rabbits by the millions. Why does McCullough have to kill the bunnies? 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? The human death toll in the book is what grieves us the most. 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. 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. None of the Cleary boys get married--because 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 utterly destroys the book is the death that occurs towards the end. 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. When we first read it we are stunned. It can't be; there must be some mistake. We go back and read the passage again. No, there is no mistake. We cry out in horror: WHY, COLLEEN, WHY THIS?! WHY NOT BOB OR JIMS OR FEE WHO WOULD WELCOME DEATH. WHY MUST IT BE THIS?? And them we calm down. It's only a novel. It isn't real. It is all imaginary. And we go on to finish the book.
The second limiting factor in the book is the meandering plot. McCullough does not seem to know where she is going with this book. Reading it is like wandering through a maze. Down one path--nope, better find another. For example, the book begins with the conflict between Fee, her son Frank and her husband Paddy. The hot-tempered Frank is unlike the other Cleary boys and we soon learn why. But where does this plot line go? Frank leaves to become a boxer and the next thing we know McCullough has him in prison for 30 years! When he does come back to Dongheha he is but a shell of his former self and spends his time puttering in the garden. Then the book seems to be about Fee and Paddy, but that line fizzles out too.
The one central unifying theme is the relationship between Meggie and Father Ralph. 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.
In fairness to McCullough, it is not as though she doesn't warn us. The title, is taken from a bird that impales itself on a thorn and sings until it dies. 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. 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 the end Drogheda will be no more and we find Meggie resigned to this fate.
Does all of this mean that the book is not worth reading? Of course not. It is, to use a trite expression, "a damn good read." Women will love it; men will at least enjoy parts of it. It presents aspects of life--New Zealand, the Australian outback, the inner chambers of the Holy See--that none of us are likely to experience. Read it. Enjoy it as best you can. But realize before you do that you are about to descend in something akin to Dante's Inferno--and don't compare it to War and Peace.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Very Enjoyable Read from Down Under!
Comment: 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. This book may raise a few eyebrows today with what has been going on in the church.
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