The Thorn Birds
by
Harper & Row, $9.95
The publicity surrounding the appearance of The Thorn Birds is in itself material for a best seller. An all-but-unknown author dashes off a novel (30,000 words on a good night) that comes to be touted as the Australian Gone With the Wind. Paperback rights are auctioned for $1.9 million before the hard-cover edition is off the press. Visions of movie rights dance in publishers’ heads.
The novel is the saga of three generations of the Cleary family: hardworking Paddy and sad Fee, who, after struggling to raise their brood in the wilds of New Zealand, inherit Drogheda, the last of the great Australian ranches; their seven sons, wedded to the land; and their daughter, beautiful Meggie, whose love for the glamorous priest Ralph de Bricassart is doomed, and Meggie’s children, feisty Justine and tragic Dane. The novel promises romance, sentiment, history, the appeal of a faraway setting.
You may ask: Is The Thom Birds a good book? No, it isn’t. It is, in fact, awesomely bad. The writing is amateurish, all adjectives and exclamation points. The dialogue is leaden (“Well,” says Rainer Moerling Hartheim, the dashing German diplomat, to his beloved, “with growing British participation in the European Economic Community, I’m spending so much time in England that it’s become more practical for me to have some sort of local pied-à-terre, so I’ve leased a house on Park Lane”). The characters are mechanical contrivances that permit the plot to grind along without encountering much resistance.
To its credit, The Thorn Birds is as easy to absorb as an hour of The Bionic Woman and as addictive as popcorn, if you like popcorn; and at 530 pages, it is a lot of product for the money.
—Amanda Heller