The Thorn Birds

I really was having a major reading slump this summer and couldn’t find books that kept my concentration to the end. I finished, and more importantly, enjoyed reading In This Sign though so I went looking for another family saga kind of a thing that might hold me for a while, and came across this. It’s mostly known, in the UK at least, for a 1980s TV mini-series which I’ve never seen and knew nothing about but which vaguely put me off reading the book (and apparently the TV series is actually American, I did say I knew nothing!). The book had a introduction from Maeve Binchy whose books were the kind of easy reading saga I was after. Happily I skipped reading the intro as I found later that it goes straight into spoilers and is aimed at readers coming from the TV series. I’d heard something good about the book somewhere anyway, and it was published by Virago Modern Classics so I had expectations that it would be better than average.

Enough of the justification. It didn’t hold my interest as well as I’d hoped, probably taking me five or six weeks to get through, but there was never a point where I felt I was going to put it down at not finish it. It tells the story of the Cleary family, beginning on the fourth birthday of their only daughter Meggie in 1915 and going on up to the 1960s. A curiously similar span of time to the one covered in In This Sign actually, but both books were published in the 1970s so that makes sense. The family of Irish immigrants begin the book as sheep shearers in New Zealand but during Meggie’s childhood are pretty much summoned by a family member to run her sheep station, Drogheda, in New South Wales. It’s a bit of a doorstop of a book and there are a lot of threads to the story but a major one is the relationship between Meggie and the local Catholic priest Father Ralph de Bricassart, also an exile from Ireland as are many of the other locals. I’m not going to spoil anything here but it’s super hard to read this in 2025 knowing everything that’s known about systemic failures within the Catholic Church today and so many things that were seen as normal enough in the book were firing off alarms in my brain. Perhaps if I’d read the introduction and it’s spoilers first I might not have felt like that but I don’t really like to go into a book knowing where parts of the story end up going.

The book is split into a series of sections that are titled with the names of different characters, though the splits are pretty minimal and there isn’t very much change of viewpoint, but there is a lot more to the book than Meggie and Ralph. It’s a long book but I’d have liked more of these different viewpoints really, there’s a lot of backstory. Though having said that at the end the book does move over to being more about the next generation. I wondered if it was going to be one of those books that the author just doesn’t know how to end, but I was definitely wrong about that and it wraps up in a reasonably satisfying way.

I’m glad I read it, and I think reading it slowly meant that I got more out of it than if I’d raced through it. Though I’m also glad my brain seems to have decided that reading is cool again and I’m getting through books faster again now!