40 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen McCulloughThe Thorn Birds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “1929-1932 Paddy”
Chapter 8 Summary
Three weeks after Mary’s death, the Cleary family moves into the main house. Ralph has been in touch, updating them about their finances. Fiona is happy to move out of the stockman’s house, and she has gone to great lengths to redecorate the main house to her liking. While sorting through old newspapers, the family discovers that three years ago, Frank received a life sentence for killing a man. When asked to comment to the court, Frank had simply requested: “Just don’t tell my mother” (223).
Fiona decides not to try to visit Frank, and her joy evaporates. Everyone in the family tries to comfort her with gifts and other gestures, but they are unsuccessful. Meggie, now burdened with the responsibility of caring for the youngest Cleary children, is resentful: “When I have my children, she would think to herself, I’m never going to love one of them more than the rest” (225).
Paddy decides to keep everyone busy to distract them from the news of Frank. He decides that Fiona will take over as bookkeeper of the estate and that Meggie will care for the livestock in the paddocks. Another letter from Ralph informs Paddy that Frank ought to be in a mental health facility. Meggie, having intercepted some of the correspondence, fantasizes about marrying Ralph: “[S]he knew it was forbidden to have a priest as a husband or lover, but she had got into the habit of getting around it by stripping Ralph of his religious office” (234-35). Paddy is aware of her feelings for Ralph, and he discourages her feelings, hoping that she will meet available men nearby.
Meanwhile, Ralph is busy disciplining a priest who has a lover. The Archbishop considers promoting Ralph to Cardinal. Ralph admits to himself that he is still in love with Meggie, but he manages to keep his feelings a secret from the Archbishop. The Archbishop, pleased with Ralph’s diplomacy in dodging questions and satisfied with his wealth and business acumen, thinks that “Rome ought to keep her eye on him" (244).
Chapter 9 Summary
The weather is increasingly dry and cold. Itinerants stop by the Drogheda estate for meals, which they receive under Paddy’s supervision. Fiona puts Stuart in charge of the shotgun again, lest any traveling visitors need managing.
Miles away from the main house, Paddy finds himself caught in an electrical storm. Bolts of lightning set the dry landscape immediately ablaze. Gum trees explode from within as Paddy’s dogs yelp in horror and pain as they burn. Paddy becomes certain of his own death, and he “capered screaming and screaming into through the holocaust. And every awful call was his wife’s name” (249).
The fire rages for three days, threatening to destroy all the property in the area; when rain finally comes, Meggie and Fiona join the other men in a search for Paddy. Stuart discharges his shotgun as a signal to the others that he has found his father’s corpse. Stuart’s firing of the shotgun disturbs a wild boar; the boar attacks and kills him.
When Ralph hears the news of the two deaths, he returns to Drogheda to see Meggie. He seizes upon her as soon as he can; they kiss passionately. Ralph confesses his love for Meggie, but he refuses to make love to her, though she seems willing. She withdraws from him, disappointed. Ralph insists that Fiona help Meggie to find a proper suitor, and he tells Meggie to forget about him. Upon his return to the Archbishop’s office, he is mildly interrogated about his attachment to the Cleary family; the Archbishop is satisfied with Ralph’s responses and tells him that he is to be promoted to Bishop and relocated to Rome. The Archbishop is especially pleased to hear rumors that Ralph has swindled the McCleary family out of their inheritance: “If indeed he had, he was well worth hanging on to” (279).
Part 3 Analysis
In these chapters, McCollough describes with dramatic flair Fiona and Paddy’s new life now that their fortunes have changed for the better. Fiona’s aristocratic early upbringing emerges through her sophisticated decorative taste as she establishes the family in Mary’s mansion. The narrator explains that “the result of Fee’s efforts was absolute beauty” (218). A catalog of fine details follows: carpets, wallpapering, Waterford chandeliers, lamps, and vases. The centerpiece of the main room is the portrait of Fee’s grandmother over the fireplace, a symbol of matriarchy as well as regime change. Paddy grows more assertive, and his dress improves as well. According to the narrator, Paddy adapts quickly to his sophisticated new home environment. At a family meeting, Paddy sits “with his steel-rimmed reading half-glasses perched on his Roman nose, in a big cream chair, his feet comfortably disposed on a matching ottoman, his pipe in a Waterford ashtray” (226).
Foreshadowing offers hints to the reader about important events in future chapters. Meggie, for example, complains that her mother favors her older brothers while ignoring her and the younger boys. She promises herself that she will not have a favorite child when she is a mother, suggesting that she will have children later in the book and that the reader will have an opportunity to discover if she keeps her promise. The presence of Stuart’s shotgun foreshadows Stuart’s use of the weapon; tragically, however, Stuart’s first impulse to fire the gun leads to his own death in an ironic twist of fate. Ostensibly, Stuart is to use the shotgun if a wanderer on the property attacks one of the women, and the shotgun is meant to protect the members of the Cleary family, not bring them harm.
McCullough’s use of imagery allows readers to more visualize the landscape. Meggie, on horseback in the paddock, notes:
The gums were full of budgies, squawking and whistling their parodies of songbirds […] The air was full of the noise of bees, and alive with brilliant quick dragonflies [and] exquisitely colored butterflies and day moths (233).
Ironically, the same vividness of imagery lends the reader scope of the violent electrical storm that destroyed the very same gum trees described idyllically. These gums eventually dry out and explode when the fire begins to rage, destroying all life in its path: “Every leaf of every tree was frizzled to a curling limp string, and where the grass had been they could see little black bundles here and there, sheep caught in the fire” (258).
