The Stolen Child - Lisa Carey

It seems like there are a lot of books dealing with fairies and the little folk recently, but few of them in my experience have put the subject to good use or have had anything original to add to the mythology. Alison Littlewood's The Hidden People, for example, comes across as a little too well researched from traditional folk stories of the past, with a debt owed to Wuthering Heights and gothic fiction that makes it feel very old-fashioned, it as if it could have been written 100 years ago. On the other hand, Laurence Donaghy's comic/horror take on Folk'd trilogy ambitiously tied the activities of the little folk to ancient Irish mythology and connected it all up to the present day by tapping into real-life family concerns. 

Perhaps it just works better in an Irish situation, but the truth is that what really makes Lisa Carey's handling of subject work so well is in how it similarly ties what goes on above the land with the legends of what lies beneath it. The two are inextricably linked, the one informing and impacting on the other, and in that respect then, yes, there's something about life in Ireland, in remote communities where life is hard and bad things happen, where there is a close relationship with the land itself that gives rise to and credence in the existence of fairies.

There's just such a community in Carey's The Stolen Child, a small group of families living on the remote island with nine miles of treacherous sea between them and the coast of Ireland. In 1960 the time has come for the people to leave the island of St Brigid's and move to homes that have been built on the mainland, as life has become unsustainable there. Just a year before the move however, an American woman had returned to claim her inheritance; a woman called Brigid. The woman is clearly troubled and has come in search of something and it's most likely the fabled well of St Brigid for its miraculous healing powers. Brigid however has healing powers of her own, and is looking for something more than that.

The people on the island aren't too keen on offering up their secrets to a stranger. Even though she is initially most hostile to the woman, it's Emer, an islander woman with her own personal problems, who befriends Brigid and comes to recognise that there is something special about her. Emer would know; as a young child she believes that the fairies rejected her after an attempted abduction, and the encounter has left a mark on her and on her son Niall, who she believes the fairies may consequently lay claim to. She recognises that Brigid herself might know something about the unique properties of the island's water and wants something else from it.

She doesn't know the half of it. Brigid's background has been a troubled one, and if you aren't supposed to take the title in the conventional sense, the question of a stolen child refers partly to Brigid's lost childhood as much as it does to fears of having a child who might be a changeling. If those two themes sound like they sit uneasily together, one of a horrific family upbringing the other of fears of little folk beneath the ground claiming your child for their own, Lisa Carey blends myth and reality together extraordinarily well without really raising the spectre of magic realism. She recognises that such fears and myths come from deep places in a dark reality, many of them related to the fate of women, the trauma of childbirth (and its associated shame in a Catholic country like Ireland), and to all the abuses that can go on within the closed doors of family.

That sounds fairly bleak material - and it does get quite grim in a few places - but it's precisely the translation of such realities into folk tales, relating people and the culture to the land, that makes The Stolen Child so compelling and relatable. Some of could be said to border on condoning or at least tolerating abuse, some of it might border on condoning the belief in fairies, but there's room for ambiguity that suggests that whether we accept it or not, things happen that we can't explain or rationalise. There's consequently an edge to the work, a dangerous eroticism, a repression of deep passions and a conversion of them into something else, something that might have to do with fairy tales or it might not. Carey harnesses these wild forces brilliantly in her writing, putting them in service of a deeper emotional truth that is thoroughly convincing.