Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy

When I was about eight years old, Margaret Mahy gave a reading of her book 'The Wind Between the Stars' in the library of my Dunedin primary school. I remember being slightly disconcerted by that reading: perhaps, at that time, my idea of an author was of someone in tweeds and twinset, instead of a rainbow-coloured fright wig. I was certainly unsettled by the book, in which the wind was far wilder and more unruly than I wished to imagine. Unsettlement gave way to exhilaration when, aged fourteen, I bought 'The Changeover', recently published in hardback. It was one of the first books I had bought with my own money; I was drawn to it because I had read others of Mahy's books, because it was widely celebrated, and because it was such a beautifully produced object: not only was the cover designed by Bruce Hogarth tantalising, but its pages were a smooth, gleaming white, and were bound firmly into its dark cover. I remember sniffing the pages, seduced by the whiff of printer's ink, before reading it.