"Something I can get my teeth into", the woman in the library said to me the other day. The analogy with eating is fairly important, as is the grass-roots conviction that novels should be long, pleasurable, and nourishing. The Thorn Birds, a saga of love, money, adventure and disaster in the Australian outback, has arrived in time to save a sizable part of the population from malnutrition.

Of course it will be publicized as Australia's answer to Gone with the Wind and of course it contains vast areas of tosh, although those interested in role reversal will notice that the petulance and whimsy that made life at Tara so taxing have taken an unexpected turn. "I'll make you writhe", says malevolent chatelaine Mary Carson to her parish priest, Father (later Cardinal) Ralph de Bricassart …: "You're the most fascinating man I've ever met. You throw your beauty in our teeth, contemptuous of our foolishness. But I'll pin you to the wall on your own weakness, I'll make you sell yourself like any painted whore. Do you doubt it?"

This is not merely bad writing; it is true innocence, and it should be respected. For Colleen McCullough, who is not yet a professional novelist but is every inch a storyteller, shares the same appetites as the average reader and indeed does much to satisfy them. Innocence and generosity transform this chronicle of three women into something that is very close to compulsive reading. And it is the sort of reading that kept people happy before the advent of the television serial, a blockbusting yarn that has very little to do with the way we live now. For all its lavishness, the underlying ethic is a stern one. Miss McCullough is at her most authentic when she describes the vicissitudes of work and the character of landscape…. Ralph is a dead bore; the love scenes have the awesome imprecision of Lord Peter Wimsey's honeymoon and it is clear that they have been imposed on a story which is mainly a territorial rather than a sexual odyssey. When describing the eminent churchman's escapades, which somehow do not stand in the way of his career at the Vatican, Miss McCullough seems to be leaning rather heavily on La Faute de l'abbé Mouret; when describing the agonies of cane-cutting in North Queensland, she is most vividly herself.

The novel is a weird mixture of unusual description and concocted incident. No summary could do justice to the plot and might in any case lend itself too easily to parody. Suffice it to say that the women are indomitable, the men unreliable, the territory formidable, and the cash turnover immense. We are allowed the comfort of a complete disregard for the norm…. It is something of an achievement—in fact it is a considerable achievement—that no one could read this book simply for an easy laugh. Discrepancies of scale disappear in the relentless onward march of the narrative and at the end, which, it must be said, is far too long delayed, are not much remembered. It is in fact a good bad book, and it deserves a suspension of the critical faculties. It will give the woman in the public library something to get her teeth into at last.

And I suspect that it is not exclusively a woman's book…. Despite Miss McCullough's scorn for her male protagonists, there is no sexism in her argument, and there may indeed be a kind of homestead revival in her readership…. I suggest we all stick with her. She is clearly extraordinary in a way both men and women can admire….