Excerpt from a review

"Brandishing her sword and with her basket overflowing with idiosyncratic possessions, Breughel's Mad Meg hurtles through a chaotic landscape of nightmarish forms. Sally Morrison sees her as uttering the 'silent bellow' of the individual within the 'mindless melee' of society.

Meg becomes an appropriate symbol and focal point for Morrison's witty and absorbing novel. It is concerned with history, the individual, conflicting ideologies, fantasy and art. The narrative particularly emphasises the evolution of Australian society, in both urban and rural settings, this century, and its relationship with events and cultural movements in Europe.

All this sounds rather ambitious, but Morrison succeeds admirably, concentrating her imagination on the lives of a number of families connected by kinship, friendship or hostility. Her special focus is the family of Stella Motte and Henry Coretti as seen through the eyes of their younger daughter Isobel.

Isobel gradually exposes the lives of her father, an Italian artist, and of his kindly but limited Australian wife. The charming, wayward Henry early deserts his family, but Stella romanticises his memory while also coming to regard him as a failure 'who did his best'.

Both Isobel and her fated sister Allegra never quite had a normal childhood, and their life trials are many. Yet these trials, in love, business and career, are related by Isobel with both humour and insight. Though serious issues are raised, whether about the evils of Fascism or of violence against women, Isobel's funny/sad voice remains totally sane as well as enticing for the reader.

In her telling of personal, family and national histories Isobel highlights the need for people to value and protect their freedom. All of us, as her Italian grandmother says, have a 'moral duty to the future…each person's actions matter, and that is the only constant in history.'

Isobel has a gift for compassion – both for her increasingly eccentric mother and oppressed sister and for a motley circle of others. In the most unlikely people she sees a striving for the good, a recognition of the 'need for grace in life'. An artist like her father, she paints a crowd of 'bottom-heavy people, with tiny, ineffectual wings' whose faces are turned yearningly towards the heavens. Morrison's awareness of the compulsions that drive people – their ideology, the desire for fame or beautiful things, for self-expression or aggrandisement – is enthrallingly evident in this wise and balanced novel. It almost makes one believe with Matthew Arnold that literature and morality are inseparable."

(Veronica Sen The Canberra Times, Saturday May 28th, 1994)

For a perspective on Mad Meg among other novels of the time: