The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

In 1949, seven-year-old Henry Day is stolen by hobgoblins and replaced with one of their own. This is both their stories, intertwined in a double first-person narrative. The imposter Henry Day grows up, discovers his gift for music, falls in love, has a child of his own, is haunted by the memories of his time with the hobgoblins and the even more distant echoes of the autistic German boy he was a century ago, before he himself was stolen. The “real” Henry Day becomes one of the hobgoblins, ageless wild children living in the forest, each waiting their turn to change places with the next chosen child. The two narratives are facing mirrors, as the man who was a hobgoblin and the hobgoblin who was a child remember and forget and hover obsessively at the edges of each other’s lives.

There’s a rich vein of mythology to draw on here, and Donohue drinks deep. The worldbuilding is really excellent, the mythos laid on with just the right weight to intrigue the reader literate in the context, but delicately enough not to disturb the unknowing reader. The hobgoblin community is particularly well done – their stunted sexuality is disturbing, and the toll the modern world begins to take on the feral band is also cleverly drawn. This is a book gently seasoned with the wild, wailing strangeness of faerie, and of the changeling legends. “Not any boy or girl will do, but only those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuned to the weeping troubles of this world.” And Donohue is conscious of how legend works. There’s a fabulous scene where Henry discovers a journal article about how the changeling legends are the work of medieval European parents who had a sickly baby or a child who could not thrive, searching for justification for the economic necessity of leaving them out to die of exposure. It’s touches like this that layer the book in the way that legends are layered in our consciousness – the real and the explicable bound inextricably to the ancient and the unexplainable, so we can hold both conceptions at once.

The writing is also quite good, especially in a debut novel. My chief complaint is partly taste, but not all. Like so many debut novelists, Donohue lets his blooming obsession with the creative process show through a bit too much. It’s pretty much impossible to introduce a character who is a writer (the hobgoblin half of the duo) or a character with some other specific creative outlet (Henry Day’s symphony composition) without having those creative acts take on a great deal of thematic weight. And, well, it was just too much weight for this reader who is frankly sick of that really damn old trick.

A good book, an excellent conceit executed competently with a lot of depth behind the story. I enjoyed reading it in the way you enjoy watching an interesting machine work – an involving diversion, yet ultimately an act of observation, not participation. This book engaged my mind, not my heart – one or the other is fine when done well like this, but I will always wish for both.