Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

Novel about family and personal identity, politics and art. In Europe and Australia.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Born in Sydney and now living in Melbourne, Sally Morrison originally trained as a molecular biologist before beginning her writing career in the 1970s.

Her work includes the play Hag, short story collection I Am Boat, and novels Who's Taking You to the Dance, Against Gravity, The Insatiable Desire of Injured Love and the award-winning Mad Meg, which is set in the same world as Window Gods. Her last book was a biography of Clifton Pugh, After Fire.

Reviews

[Velvetink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to describe, an Italo-Australian family, antifascist polititics combined with feminist theory and art development in Australia. A good read.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rich and complex story, maybe in parts too rich. Certainly in parts it is written in an obscure and self-conscious way that is extremely hard to pick your way through as a reader, it's cluttered with hinted at meanings and for most of its 400+ pages lacks flow.

Nevertheless it was full of feminist promise in the complexity of the book and seeming courageously truth-telling about passion, darkness and the genderedness of experience (and art and even to some degree politics). It ultimately failed to live up to the promise however, time and again ducking into a messy essentialism and at the end claiming this triumphantly as if it resolves anything...after all we are apparently our chromasomes. In a book where there is so much passion and sexuality but lesbians as usual are entirely absent and impossible (not even bisexual women) you can't I suppose come up with anything else.

I was interested in the political stuff the way the German persecution of Jews was on such an immense scale that it rocked the whole world, so much suffering. I wonder about things of today that will hurt everyone to the same degree in retrospect (I can make some guesses).

I am going to say this book was set in Victoria, Australia. There was travelling but the base was definitely Australian. Also to be fair the book is older than my eldest son (just) so I guess radical feminism might have been so defeatist back then.

[Millie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps one way to describe "Mad Meg" is as a multi-layered history of characters. Another might be a story about art. My preference is to interpret it as metaphorically representing the painting on the cover of Mad Meg and an army of women attacking beings from hell. The women in this book are always engaged in a battle that life throws their way.