The Stolen Child [ペーパーバック]

THE STOLEN CHILD, an ingeniously crafted tale about hobgoblins, is a coming of age story and one about identities both lost and found. This beguiling yet tragic novel is placed in the recent past when, at least in the "sophisticated" and technology driven West, the faery myths have lost their hold on the popular consciousness and the creatures have thus become, to our loss, an endangered species joining griffins, mermaids, gorgons, centaurs, and unicorns.

It's the late 1940s in a rural setting, seven year-old Henry Day, alone in the woods near his home, is abducted by a band of a dozen hobgoblins, which, in mythology, are faeries "gone bad". By the story's definition, each hobgoblin was once human before being kidnapped while still young and, by some subtle process, turned into a creature that never ages, even over hundreds of years. At some point, determined by seniority within the group, a hobgoblin, or "changeling", can return to the society of humans by co-opting the identity of a kidnapped child. Once returned to the "upper world", the hobgoblin takes up the aging process where he/she left off. In this case, Henry, now "Aniday", languishes in the purgatory of eternal childhood while his replacement matures to fully actualized adulthood as "Henry Day". Aniday's tragedy comprises an identity and life's potential lost, while Henry's is that his new identity vies with that of his previous human existence, began in 1851, which Day subliminally remembers and eventually obsesses over.

The novel's thirty-six chapters alternate between Aniday and Henry, each telling his first-person story as it extends over three decades, the history of each touching at points with the other until a final confrontation, such as it is.

This is Keith Donohue's first novel, and I'm awarding five stars for cleverness, though it does have problems which would compel me to grant only four if coming from a more accomplished author. The story concludes in a way that was, for me, very unfulfilling; I thought it lacked closure for both characters. Also, the hobgoblins, who were all once human and can become so again anytime they chose, now live a wretched, unhygienic, near-starvation existence continually exposed to the elements and possible injury while subsisting only with the help of food, garb, and utensils scavenged or stolen from humans. (Indeed, the mischievous hobgoblin will steal one sock from a clothesline to create "the mystery of the missing sock from every washday".) That being the case, the author, while removing for the reader much of the magic, mystery and whimsicality of the faeries' existence, supplies no compelling imperative for them to remain the creatures they are. Indeed, they exist at all because human society once believed in their reality, and they now approach extinction because the twentieth century's technological enlightenment leaves them no room.

THE STOLEN CHILD is a fairy tale for adults that transcends standard fare.

This haunting and beautifully written debut novel had me compulsively turning its pages. I simply could not put it down! The author has created a fantasy world that exists on the cusp of the consciousness of humans. It is a world that is the stuff of fairy tales, only the author has turned it into one that is fitting for adults. Lyrical in its telling, the author spins a story about a world that exists side by side with the one that we inhabit everyday. It is a world of the changelings. These are creatures that exist only to burrow into our lives by usurping the place of a human child. How they do it, why they do it, and the ramifications of their actions are at the crux of this fascinating and wonderful, poignantly told story.

Seven year old Henry Day is just an ordinary seven year old boy living in nineteen forties America, when changelings cross his path. It would be a day that would mark his life forever, as one of the changelings transforms into Henry Day, and Henry Day becomes a changeling known as Aniday. The book tells their respective, symbiotic stories in compelling, parallel, first person narratives that will keep the reader turning the pages of this most engaging book. It is a story that is charged with great emotional impact, as it conveys the desire that each one of us has to fit into the social fabric that is woven around every one of us from that day that we are born. The reader will discover that this often conflicts with the desire to maintain one's unique sense of self. As the years pass by for Henry and Aniday, it is also a story about memories of one's past that impact on one's present and the ability to reconcile those memories, so as to have a future worth living.

This is simply one of the best books that I have read this year. Bravo!

Inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem "The Stolen Child", Keith Donohue's novel of the same title is a fine addition to the fantasy literature genre, yet told with the ample realism one expects from great works of mainstream literature.

It is truly a gripping, page-turning "bedtime story for adults", which will appeal to those familiar with novels replete with magical realism like recent bestsellers "Life of Pi", "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell", and "The Confessions of Max Tivoli". Whether "The Stolen Child" is a work of fantasy worthy of comparison with those by J. R. R. Tolkien - and will interest those familiar with Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" - is indeed an excellent question. I, for one, am inclined to think not, since "The Stolen Child" barely grasps at the Christian religious symbolism that occurs throughout most of Tolkien's writings.

However, in its own right, "The Stolen Child" is a fascinating, often compelling, exploration of self-awareness and personal identity, through the difficult rite of passage from childhood into adulthood. It is a far more serious, often darker, exploration of these themes, than what I recall in Neil Gaiman's recent bestsellers "American Gods" and "Anansi Boys". Those expecting the ample humor present in Gaiman's fiction will be startled by Donoghue's bleaker literary style; a style that is as well wrought as Gaiman's, heralding the advent of another fine prose stylist in fantasy literature.

Donoghue's intricately woven tale shifts back and forth between the real Henry Day and his changeling doppelganger. Seized by changelings near his rural Pennsylvanian farm, Henry Day joins their small band as Aniday - a hobgoblin blessed with eternal youth, never aging beyond his physical age of seven; but he is cursed knowing that he must await his turn as the band's newest member, before he can be transformed back into human form as a changeling sometime in the distant future. He shares in the band's many and tribulations across years and decades, enduring a bleak feral existence made tolerable only by his obsessive desire to acquire the skills of reading and writing. The changeling who becomes the adult Henry Day, rekindles old, almost forgotten, memories of a childhood in 19th Century Europe and America. Memories that are revived through his splendid piano playing in his youth--a skill absent in the real Henry Day - and a strong desire to compose great works of contemporary classical music.

Memories that shall take him eventually back to Europe in search of his own past, accompanied by his sympathetic, yet unsuspecting, bride, ignorant of his true identity. Donoghue deftly weaves between these two parallel stories, leading to a heart-wrenching, all too brief emotional climax, that is remarkable because of the author's skill in setting it up, in his terse, yet often lyrical prose. Without question, "The Stolen Child" is a remarkable contemporary twist on the changeling fantasy saga, and one worthy of a wide readership whose literary tastes range from realism to fantasy.