introduction

It's beautiful, the Australian landscape where Meggie settles as a young woman, but it's neither a gentle nor an easy life. With brothers, but no sisters, and a somewhat withdrawn mother, Meggie has to make her own way and find out about life on her own. There are men around, of course, plenty of men, but no maps for Meggie in this uncharted territory.

And then she finds her first real friend, confidant, adviser and love. This is all wrapped up in the person of one man, a man who, in spite of his good intentions for her, will spoil her for all other men and make them seem inferior by comparison

Although this novel was written thirty years ago, it is a story about a Catholic middle class almost fifty years before that. So when the novel was set, the love of a girl for a celibate Catholic priest would have been so forbidden as to be fantastical. it were talked about, thought about at all, it would have been at best as a silly crush that would undoubtedly fade away before anyone got hurt. That either one of them should act on their passion was unthinkable a girl who would wilfully distract one of God's chosen vessels from the path of righteousness? A priest who would give in to temptation and break his vows? There were no words strong enough to describe their folly and their sin.

Remember, Colleen McCullough was writing this in the 1970s, and even though to many readers that may seem a long time ago, it was a very different era to the twenties and thirties. The 1960s had left their mark. This was the decade of change, when Women's Liberation began, when people decided to **** **** Not War, and when a young and classless society had decided that it was tired of standing back to let the Establishment run things. The Thorn Birds was published in the same year as The Women's Room!

We were in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, when Rome had begun to open up a few tantalising areas for discussion: such as allowing the laity to be consulted about how their Church was run; such as the priest actually facing the congregation rather than loftily standing with his back to the ordinary people. Not enough, not nearly enough of course, but at least the possibility of change had been admitted and the possibility of questioning had begun.

Here was the first popular novel where the heroine knows that there is no other man for her except the priest, and that one day she will get him. And we know it too. And we are with Meggie every step of the way. The issues are not avoided. There is no skating over the implications, no avoiding the consequences. We know they will get together and it's not so much a question of if but when. It gives the story an almost unbearable sense of urgency. Every time Ralph de Bricassart has to be in the area the hairs stand up on the back of our necks. Will it be this time?

There are so many other questions: does Mary Carson, the jealous old relative who owns Drogheda, really know of the attraction between them or is she such a sad and bitter old woman that she sees rivals and stumbling blocks everywhere? Is she so poisoned by her own failure to get anywhere with the handsome young priest that she invents enemies where none exist? Does Meggie's mother Fiona suspect much earlier than we thought? And if so, why does she stay so strangely silent about it?

The rationale - or lack of it - in trying to maintain a celibate clergy is faced and not skirted around. But this was never a battle between Meggie and the rules of the Church. The war is in Ralph de Bricassart's soul because he wants everything to be the love of her life and to be a Prince of the Church as well - he wants them both. And Meggie will find out that Mother Church is a much more dangerous rival than any other flesh-and-blood woman might have been. Any ordinary woman she could have beaten hands down. But the power of the Church...

So she must make her own deal. She finds what we would call 'an Irish solution to an Irish problem'. Not wholly satisfactory of course. What compromise ever is? But it lets her get on well enough with her life.

There will always be those who say that the man-made law refusing the normal fulfilment of a happy married life to some of Christ's pastors is so ludicrous that we should not dignify it with all this interest, particularly since the past thirty years have unveiled somany scandals, so much hypocrisy and such well-documented cover-ups. But I have always been of a sunny and optimistic temperament and I believe that the laws on clerical celibacy are in their last throes. I feel sure that when The Thorn Birds is sixty years old, rather than a mere thirty, married Catholic clergy will be the norm. We may even have seen the day when the supreme pontiff can kiss his wife on the steps of St Peter's in Rome.

Or, better still, when the new Pope can kiss her husband. By then the story will need a seriously updated introduction to explain what all the fuss was about in the bad old days.

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