About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

THE WONDER
by Emma Donoghue
HarperCollins, September 2016
304 pages
$32.99 CAD
ISBN: 1443450022


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Rural Ireland in the mid-1850s was still trying to recover from the Great Famine that had reduced the population through death and emigration by about twenty-five percent. Ireland to this day has not achieved a population size equivalent to what it was before the potato blight arrived and the people starved. In Emma Donoghue's new historical novel, Lib Wright, a nurse who worked under Florence Nightingale at Scutari, has taken a job to monitor the situation of a young girl, Anna O'Donnell, living on a farm in the dead centre of the country. Anna is reported miraculously not to have eaten for the last four months but still to have retained her health and strength. Lib has been hired to keep a close eye on Anna in order to determine whether or not she is a fraud. She will share her task with a Roman Catholic nun.

Lib is what would have been called at the time a freethinker and does not for one minute believe that Anna is genuinely fasting. She also brings with her to Ireland the conventional British Protestant prejudices against the Irish, viewing them as mired in superstition and under the thumb of the Church. But she is essentially fair-minded and therefore needs proof of how the trick is being worked before she will declare Anna and her family frauds.

Lib has been hired by a committee of locally prominent men, most of whom either believe or want to believe that Anna is indeed actually miraculous. There is a lot at stake. People have begun to flock to the impoverished area, hoping to be blessed and leaving behind donations to that end. The town stands to benefit significantly if Anna is certified legitimate. And this is why they have sent for Lib, whose credentials as a Nightingale nurse and a non-Catholic are impeccable. Had she known what she was getting into, she would not have come, but now she is there and she will do her duty.

Her duty involves being in the exclusive company of Anna for twelve hours straight, never allowing the girl out of her sight or permitting others to get close to her. (The nun takes the other shift.) The situation is a bit reminiscent of Donoghue's earlier ROOM in that the focus is on an intense relationship between an adult and a child that excludes external connections or influences. It also evokes ROOM in Donoghue's sensitive treatment of a child. Anna is an odd, intense, and mysterious child, one who might, just might, be a wonder. But as the intense supervision of both watchers never wavers, she does begin to fade. Lib has grown fond of the child and fears that her very presence, interfering with however Anna had been previously fed, would be her death.

Though THE WONDER is page-turningly suspenseful it is not really a crime novel, even though a crime may have been committed and a worse one may yet take place. What it is primarily is a brilliantly managed account of a life-changing encounter between two individuals, each to some degree confined by her own circumstances. Any hope for a satisfactory ending to the threat to Anna's life depends on both Anna and Lib being capable of change, of imagining some alternative to the iron realities that rule them both.

Along the way, we learn that the chief lesson that Lib learned in her training under Florence Nightingale was the importance of observation. Donoghue may not be a nurse, but she can certainly observe and convey the telling tiny details of life in mid-19th century Ireland so immediately that an entire world emerges fully, much as a very different one did from the confines of ROOM. As an act of historical imagination and of human empathy, THE WONDER is a spectacular achievement.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2016

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]