Rating: ***** 5 stars

Margaret Mahy,
24 Hours.
Collins Flamingo, 2001

At the end of this fascinating novel we leave Ellis, its 17-year-old hero, ‘a man sorting through a while lifetime’s experience as he sets out once more into the dangerous world’. The starting point for the odyssey into the twenty-four hours of experience which lead to this denouement is a meeting with Jackie, a fellow pupil from early schooldays. Now in his pre-university year, and intending to become an actor, Ellis is wandering his home town, anticipating the adventures which his new independence will bring. But it is not merely a matter of time present and future, since time past intrudes also, both in the guise of Jackie’s reappearance in Ellis’s life and in the shadow cast by his friend Simon’s suicide. Mahy’s linking of these circumstances and her delineation of their role in contributing to Ellis’s growth, in a novel characterised by its richness of imagines experience and its gallery of colourful humanity, is totally masterly and highly entertaining.

Robert Dunbar