[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt approves of The Thorn Birds as a good example of predictable escapist fiction.]

Going over the notes I kept while reading The Thorn Birds—and there were many pages of them because an awful lot happens in Colleen McCullough's novel about 54 years in the life of an Australian sheep-farming family—I found that one entry I wanted to check read "Dane drowns—P. 485." This was curious, because when I actually turned to the cited page it turned out that Dane had not actually drowned until page 487. And when I consulted several other important events in the three-generation history of the Clearys—mostly these events are deaths, because the Clearys do a great deal of dying—I found the same pattern repeated. The page number 'cited' for the event would almost always precede the actual page on which the event occurred.

Now this apparent carelessness of mine doesn't mean that I was totally indifferent to what happens in The Thorn Birds. In fact I often cared considerably, Father Dane O'Neill's drowning in the sea off Crete, for example, is really quite upsetting, because Dane is young and attractive and has just fulfilled his ambition to be ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. What's more, he is the love-child of the novel's heroine and hero, Meggie Cleary O'Neill and Cardinal Ralph Raoul de Bricassart, both appealing, vividly drawn characters whose frustrated love for each other supplies almost as much energy to The Thorn Birds as does Scarlett O'Hara's and Rhett Butler's romance to Gone With the Wind.

Women's Frustration

Furthermore, Dane's drowning is thematically significant, for it comments ironically on a central frustration of Miss McCullough's passionate women. This is that if their men are truly dedicated to an ideal such as service to the Lord, and they are perfect in their dedication, then they can no longer serve life, and by extension their women. Shortly before he dies, Father Dane asks God to "Plunge Thy spear into my breast, burying it there so deeply I am never able to withdraw it! Make me suffer…. For Thee I forsake all others, even my mother and my sister and the Cardinal."

In praying thus, Dane recalls the novel's Epigraph, which tells the legend of the bird that sings only after it has impaled itself upon the longest, sharpest spine of the thorn tree. A little while after his prayer, he goes swimming, feels a sharp pain in his chest and drowns. It is a nice point. And yet I could see it coming from several closely printed pages away. All Miss McCullough had to tell us was that Dane was alone and headed for the seashore, and I stopped to scribble in my notes, "Dane drowns—P. 485."

Is this predictability a defect of The Thorn Birds? After all, predictability is inevitable in good old-fashioned story-telling, and The Thorn Birds, all 280,000 words of it, is nothing if not good old-fashioned story-telling. It certainly isn't the originality of the prose we savor when the author can write of women who "work their fingers to the bone," parlor rugs that are "beaten within an inch of their lives," and one of Dane O'Neill's ancestors who was "flogged … to jellied pulp," to mention but a handful of phrases so clichéd that we began to think that Miss McCullough is up to something.

Nor is it the dialogue we relish, if Miss McCullough's heroine can deliver a set speech that goes as follows: "Just a man. You're all the same, great big hairy moths bashing your selves to pieces after a silly flame behind a glass so clear your eyes don't see it. And if you do manage to blunder your way inside the glass to fly into the flame, you fall down burned and dead. While all the time out there in the cool night there's food, and love, and baby moths to get. But do you see it, do you want it? No! It's back after the flame again, beating yourselves senseless until you burn yourselves dead!"

Wanted: Predictability

But we want predictability in our popular escape literature—and The Thorn Birds is nothing if not popular escape literature, to judge from the advance publicity it has been receiving, and the record price of almost $2 million it has received for its paperback rights. Well, yes, but there is predictability and predictability. There is the sort of predictability where you know what is going to happen, yet relish the anticipation of it so much that you purposely deny that you know what is going to happen. And there is the sort where you know what is going to happen, and it has happened so many times before that you pay only half your attention to it.

The Thorn Birds, I'm afraid, has happened before. Its theme and its form are familiar. Even its locale, the Outback of Australia's New South Wales, although topically novel is generically familiar. (And incidentally, Miss McCullough, while Australian born and the author of a previous novel, Tim, still retains that tiresome English habit of separating her lengthy nature descriptions from the substance of her plot.) That is why we always know what is going to happen in The Thorn Birds before it happens. And that is why I couldn't be bothered to wait for it to happen before noting it down.