National identity
The question of identity is clearly at the center of what makes this novel tick. Because identity is complicated, the characters are forced to work through who they are, Morag in relationship to her daughter and her past, and Pique in relationship to her parents and her future. She struggles to understand national identity, like her mother did before her. By working to re-acquire the lost heritage that she did not get from her father, she parses her identity through experience.
The family unit
The novel is in many ways a social novel, although it is very thoughtful and reflective. The portraits of the novel are typically portraits of people in family relationships. There is an unhealthy marriage and a passionate affair. There is mother and daughter, the abandoning father. There is even Morag's own childhood which she discusses. We learn that she was fostered, and her relationship to her "true parents" was difficult for her to understand. The imagery is expressed kind of like variations on a theme.
Control and patriarchy
The controlling husband is an important instance of irony in the book. The patriarchal expectations that were handed down to Skelton by his own cultural heritage were domineering and slavish toward Morag. Her free and artistic spirit encountered this control and patriarchy in concrete and abstract ways; the concrete imagery is the marriage and her affair, and the abstract quality of the imagery is actually close to death. She feels a part of her dying when she obeys her mean and controlling husband.
Acceptance and love
The novel explores what it means to love someone, but the imagery that defines love is specific. The question is about community; love is shown as a kind of willingness to be in community with someone, and in community, a person is honest about their self and their point of view. Morag experiences this imagery most during her pilgrimage to Scotland, after which she accepts her foster parents with true familial love. She settles the question of her family identity that way, and Pique is similar.
