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REVIEW: Novelist deftly blends literary fiction, fantasy

By Emily Grosvenor

“Atoms and angels, reason and faith. One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality,” says a menacing and dark figure that never receives a name in Keith Donohue’s engrossing new novel Angels of Destruction.

From its ominous first page to the tumbling blocks of its final chapters, Angels of Destruction is a masterfully paced thriller that reads like a fairy tale and tests the limits of fiction without ever losing believability. It is a work that is sure to cement Donohue, who reads at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City at 7 p.m. Friday, as one of our most gifted storytellers and most original voices — one whose interests lie in the murky area between the real and the imagined.

The book opens with the arrival of a young girl named Norah on the doorstep of Margaret Quinn, a lonely widow whose husband has long died and whose only daughter ran away with a 1970s era radical ten years before. Materializing, it would seem, out of thin air, Norah presents herself as the antidote to Margaret’s unabiding sadness. Together, they concoct a story that Norah is her granddaughter, the daughter of Margaret’s long lost daughter Erica.

Very quickly, Norah establishes that she is no ordinary little girl. She speaks in beautifully crafted sentences, has a vocabulary to rival those of most college professors and drops prophetic bombs every time she is drawn into a meaningful conversation. She tracks animals with ease. She creates miracles that astound her classmates and anger their parents.

Norah is Donohue’s perfect deus ex machina, though she seems to create as many problems as she resolves. She’s also pretty darn spooky. The way Donohue draws her, Norah could very much be a Stepford Kid sent to menace the town, a religious fanatic a la the Exorcist (just waiting for her demons to emerge). Or — and this might be the least likely scenario to the characters in the book — an angel in the flesh. In fact, the book’s main mystery involves discovering whether Norah actually is who or what she says she is.

Meanwhile, Donohue weaves in Erica’s story, that of a normal teenage girl growing up in the 1970s whose faith in her parents is destroyed when she discovers what her father did as a doctor in the U.S. military during World War II. She skips town with her boyfriend Wiley, a troubled teen who directs his anger at society through an interest in the domestic terrorist group the Angels of Destruction. Their Bonnie and Clyde adventures as they flee their families for California are plucked from a parent’s worst nightmare, but they read like a perfectly crafted screenplay. Erica’s story gives depth and historical gravitas to a book that might have otherwise been little more than an exceptionally well written contemporary fable.

With this new book straddling the same gulch between literary fiction and fantasy as his 2006 debut The Stolen Child, Donohue is quickly creating a body of work that is calling into being a genre all of his own – one that requires two great fictional leaps. First, you have to believe the world that he is creating that is very much like our own, with elementary schools, small towns, family secrets and intergenerational conflicts (check). Then, you must believe that within this real, imagined world, there can be something unreal lurking behind the scenes, creating atmosphere, conflict, and propelling the main dramas of the book. In The Stolen Child, it was goblins that stole a baby and exchanged him with an imposter. In Angels of Destruction, that something is the angels themselves — and they appear in places you would never imagine them to be (checkmate).

Donohue reads at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. Friday. The reading will be streamed live and archived on the UI Writing University web site.