Promoters are calling [The Thorn Birds] the Australian Gone With The Wind.

The Thorn Birds does resemble Gone With The Wind in containing a feisty Irish paterfamilias, a long-suffering mother, and a set of red-headed twins. It also features a sexy priest, a huge fortune, and three generations of family on a sprawling estate. And how little it makes of these possibilities!

In scene after scene, McCullough moves to the edge of conflict, peeks over, then shies away. The book opens on Meggie Cleary's fourth birthday, when her brothers wreck her new doll. The parents admonish the boys not to misbehave again. They never do. Paddy Cleary's sister summons his family to live on her Australian sheep station, Drogheda, because she has $13 million she might leave them when she dies. Father Ralph de Bricassart takes away most of the Clearys' inheritance, and how do they react? "We're going to live in the big house …" says Paddy. "Let the church have Mary's money and welcome."

The Clearys redecorate the house, stay friends with Father Ralph, and never have any money problems. Father Ralph goes to Rome for an uneventful rise through the church hierarchy.

Meanwhile, back at the sheep ranch, Meggie Cleary has fallen secretly in love with Father Ralph and won't marry any of the neighbors' sons. She marries a shearer because he looks like Ralph, but soon spurns him with a crushing, "You can't kiss for toffee!" Drogheda endures a 10-year drought, but nothing happens because they have enough water tanks. The Clearys install screens on the windows to keep out the flies, and Archbishop Ralph notices them when he comes to visit.

When the characters are good they're goody-goody, and when they're bad they have a good excuse. Ralph confesses a dalliance with Meggie to his mentor, who says: "I am not shocked, Ralph, nor disappointed…. Humility was the one quality you lacked, and it is the very quality which makes a great saint …" McCullough allows her wayward priest to cop out of his spirit-flesh dilemma by deciding of Meggie that "she, too, was a sacrament."

Meggie bears Ralph a son, but nobody even guesses who the father is except Meggie's mother, and she never tells anybody. The insipid boy grows up to be a perfect priest, enjoying several tea parties with the cardinal.

The Thorn Birds does include a nifty fire and some colorful landscape. Punched up and rewritten, the story could make a passable motion picture. The book is definitely no page-turner, though. Instead of villainy, intrigue, or danger, McCullough offers silliness and easy resolutions:

A baby would solve everything so please let there be a baby. And there was. When she told Anne and Luddie, they were overjoyed. Luddie especially turned out to be a treasure. He did the most exquisite smocking and embroidery …

Don't we get enough of this sort of thing in real life? For escape and fun, we crave the exotic, the risque, the novel! How disappointing that the only interest The Thorn Birds can sustain is curiosity about its fate as a publishing venture. Confirmed in our dratted cynicism, we put down this mediocre book and wait to see how far the bally-hoo can carry the hohum.