SOURCE: “Clever By Far,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 48, Winter, 1992-93, pp. 55-9.

In the following review, MacKendrick provides an analysis of the characters and themes in Isobars, concluding that the volume is “a distinctive, accomplished, and completely engaging collection.”

The great majority of the 18 stories in Janette Turner Hospital's Isobars have an Australian setting. Those few with a North American locale seem more predictable and even lugubrious; they are flatter in style and more linear, altogether less apt to fracture time and voice in their narration. In short, they are less lyric in manner, less playful—for most of those stories of the Land Down Under have their own particular lightness of being and even, if the word is not cross-examined, luminosity. They range from the conventional to the refreshingly peculiar, from the sombre to the transcendental. Many are singularly stylish. A pallid recital of plot...