Haunted Histories: Time-slip Narratives in the Antipodes

Abstract

In a startling moment in Margaret Mahy's The Trickslers, Harry draws apart from the rest of her family in her attic bedroom in the family beach house, Carnival's Hide. She looks into a mirror and sees her image dismantle, allowing a very diflerent, but nevertheless clearly related figure to emerge. This is a typical event in time-slip stories, with their peculiar interest in the problematic construction of subjectivity. In this case the characters who slip between times are a bizarre trio of brothers who erupt into the more or less ordinary family lives of the Hamiltons, disturbing the modern moment with ancient memories, igniting passions, provoking revelations, raising questions about identity, threatening fragmentation, but finally harnessed in the interests of the ongoing narrative in which Harry's adult life forms. ....