Stolen

I've been hawking Keith Donahue's The Stolen Child to my friends. Not that it hasn't been getting sufficient publicity; it's one of this summer's well-received titles. In truth, I came across it so often in booklists and reviews that I was almost turned off. I was quite prepared to ignore the book. That was until I read its blurb, decided I liked what it was about - changelings - and picked it up when I was in the US.

It certainly bears the markings of a successful novel. Fantasy element; check. But grounded in the world, check. Same events seen via two perspectives (aka The Time-Traveler's Wife), check. Insertion of a cultural motif like painting or music, check. One or several characters with a sad history and intense yearning as a result, check. Beautiful writing, check check check.

The title comes from WB Yeats' famed poem, "The Stolen Child." Changelings will often lure a child away from the real world into the faery one, and put in its place a changeling disguised as the stolen child. In Donahue's novel, a child is taken and, bereft of his true name and longed-for home and family, becomes a changeling himself, one who waits for the day he can return to the human world, but only as an imposter, and not before the rest of the changeling crew get their turns.

The novel speaks eloquently and often quite hauntingly of the loss of identity, love, family, and the great desire to belong. There were nights when I read certain passages and ached for the changeling who dreamed of the people and things he'd lost; surely we too - whether we did once upon a time or still do - dream of the people and things gone from our lives.

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

~ from "The Stolen Child" by WB Yeats

Posted by Monoceros at August 13, 2006 12:33 PM