Heavenly ways to die

Week 10: The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough
Recommended by: Emma Wilson

Saga: (noun) [1] a long, involved story, account, or series of incidents. [2] not just for old people. There's no two ways about it, The Thorn Birds is a saga. Or an epic. Possibly even a romance, but a romance in the great storytelling tradition; Mills and Boon it ain't. (Probably. Having never read one I can't legitimately comment but if I were a betting man I'd feel pretty good about the chances of my horse romping home on this one.)

Not a novel I'd ever heard of before, but I gather it's something of an Antipodean classic. I also gather that it became a very successful TV serial and I'd also be willing to bet that the spotlight was primarily focused on Meggie and Ralph and somewhat missed what was, for me at least, the point. Much like I feel the focus on Kathy and Tommy's relationship in the film of Never Let Me Go, one of my all-time favourite books is rather off the mark. It's not a bad film by any means, just not hitting the same high notes or indeed in quite the right key.

But anyway, if a romance it is to be called, then it's something of a misnomer. The story is so much richer for not simply trailing around tediously after our starcrossed lovers but painting in a whole cast of characters, some admittedly more richly drawn than others. This is first and foremost a family story as far as I'm concerned, a big picture, small detail, complex blockbuster in the vein of Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. And if you know what I like in a book, then you'll know that's high praise indeed.

It took me a while to get into, not because I wasn't enjoying it, perhaps more because it's not a book to pick up and put down in ten minute chunks, it's one to live and breathe, and I failed to create the time to do this. It's a window on the past and a totally unfamiliar way of life for a 21st-century city-dweller yet it was easy to feel myself sucked into the laidback pace of life on Drogheda, the suffocation Meggie feels in Dungloe, equal parts climate and circumstance, the glimpses and politicking of Roman corridors of power.

Fleshing out three generations of a family on an isolated farmstead through 60 years of the twentieth century, the ambition is commendable, as is the narrative control, for with so many point-of-view characters it would easy to lose focus or the reader's interest. Ambition and pride are also key features of the book, sins shared by many of the characters. In fact while many have the former, almost all have some form of the latter. This, combined with an almost laughably stereotypically English failure to express any kind of emotion, particularly that of love, is really the heart of the story. And if when coming up for air it all seems melodramatic and daft, a brief moment's thought of the wonderful, diverse and loveably foolish people I know and the far more ridiculous reality of life puts this into sharper perspective.

And it's this failure which makes it so compelling. Any rewards are hard-fought and hard-won, if won at all, for tragedy is part of the warp of the story. Yet the unspoken affection, the myriad familial and created ties, the inexorable pulls of the land and of the family home run throughout the book, tiny streams that come forth together to create a rampaging river of essential humanity, vitality and life.