SOURCE: "The Song Is Familiar," in The New York Times, May 2, 1977, p. 31.

In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt approves of The Thorn Birds as a good example of predictable escapist fiction.

Going over the notes I kept while reading The Thorn Birds—and there were many pages of them because an awful lot happens in Colleen McCullough's novel about 54 years in the life of an Australian sheep-farming family—I found that one entry I wanted to check read "Dane drowns—P. 485." This was curious, because when I actually turned to the cited page it turned out that Dane had not actually drowned until page 487. And when I consulted several other important events in the three-generation history of the Clearys—mostly these events are deaths, because the Clearys do a great deal of dying—I found the same pattern repeated. The page number 'cited' for the event would almost always...