A Changeling in Disguise:Liminal Identity in Hugo Hamilton's Novel Audrey Robitaillié Hugo Hamilton is best known for his masterful memoir The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half Irish Childhood (2003), in which he tells of his nationalist Irish father and his German mother, and of the inevitable quest for belonging that marked his youth. He develops similar themes in his 2008 novel, Disguise. The novel centers on the character of Gregor Liedmann, a German musician estranged from his wife Mara and their son Daniel. He meets up with them and the rest of the family on her farm south of Berlin for a fruit gathering in an orchard. Gregor's story is at the heart of the novel; the narration alternates between the happenings at the farm and flashbacks to his childhood and earlier married life. He "replaced" a German boy lost in a bombing during World War II, when his mother Maria adopted him shortly after the death of her son during the mass exodus before the end of the war. Her husband, however, was away to the Russian front at the time, and had no inkling of this exchange. But this narrative is not the story Maria tells Gregor or, later, Mara. Throughout the novel, Gregor's mother denies ever having "replaced" her child. Obsessed with the idea that he may not be who he has been told he is, Gregor leaves his Nuremberg home at seventeen, never to return. At the core of the narration, then, is the central question, "Who am I?" as Gregor, Mara, and the reader try to make sense of the conflicting stories told by the various protagonists. Gregor is convinced that he is "a changeling, an impostor living a surrogate life inside the persona of a deceased German."1 The novel explores themes of liminality, identity, and belonging in a context of tumultuous change for Germany. Hamilton's novel tells the story of a man in search of his own history and identity, and it negotiates the topic of divided identity by using the trope of the changeling, a folk figure prominent in Irish and German folklores. Like [End Page 96] Hamilton himself in The Speckled People, Gregor is a rootless character, continually straddling geographic and other sorts of borders. To employ the terms coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Capitalism and Schizophrenia) (1972), Hamilton "deterritorializes" the figure of the changeling out of folk narratives, and "reterritorializes" it in his fiction.2 Gregor solves his search for identity through the reterritorializing power of narratives and memory. The concepts of de- and re-territorialization are especially helpful in examining Hamilton's writings: Disguise is concerned with a liminal character moving from one territory to another and grappling with the idea of home. Although the term "changeling" appears only once in the novel, the folk figure is the cornerstone on which the narrative of Disguise rests. The belief in changelings is common in Irish, Germanic, and other traditions. The folk accounts typically depict a human being, often a child or a young woman, abducted by the fairies to the Otherworld, while an ugly fairy substitute, the changeling, is left in their place in the human world. In 1980, Séamas Mac Philib listed some 430 changeling narratives in the archives of the Irish National Folklore Collection.3 German beliefs in changelings, known as Wechselbälge, date even further back.4 In both traditions, the creature is often represented as an intruder in the home, despite its similarity to the person who has been taken away. The people feared fairy abductions, and the lore includes numerous measures to ward off the evil doings of the fairies, such as a well-lit room, a fire, a sprinkle of salt, or keeping metal tools near the bed.5 This probably explains the violent banishment methods used in the folk narratives: changelings are thrown in the fire or burnt with red-hot shovels in many cases.6 The folkloric accounts clearly record the ambivalent feelings of the family. Typically, the parents are at first worried about their ill-tempered but precocious infant who is wasting away, but at...