In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no food for four months, but is inexplicably healthy. To the credulous Catholic villagers, this is a miracle. To Dr McBrearty, the village doctor, this is a fascinating medical mystery that will propel him to fame for discovering that, say, humans can survive on “magnetism, or scent.” To the English nurse, Lib Wright, veteran of the Crimean War, trained by the great Florence Nightingale herself, this will be a short-term assignment where she fully expects to identify the source of Anna O’Donnell’s food supply.
The Irish potato famine (1845 – 1852) has just ended. One million Irish died, and another million left for America and England. The people are poor, and the land provides little sustenance until the potato crop comes in fall. It is ‘the hungry season’.
There is little Lib Wright can find to like about Ireland.
Flat fields striped with dark foliage. Sheets of reddish-brown peat; wasn’t bogland known to harbour disease? The occasional grey remains of a cottage, almost greened over. Nothing that struck Lib as picturesque.
There is no proper inn. The food is poor (“everything tasted of peat”). She expects the O’Donnells to be wealthy estate owners; after all, who else could afford to hire a nurse from England? Instead, she finds them living in a small cabin
in need of a fresh coat of whitewash; pitched thatch brooded over three small squares of glass. At the far end, a cow byre stooped under the same roof
A village committee, it turns out, was formed to investigate the truth of Anna O’Donnell’s miracle, and they are the ones who hired Lib and a local nun to alternate watching Anna.
A tiny girl in grey. [..] Plump fingers cool to the touch. […] A small clear voice. […] Her face could almost have been described as chubby, which put paid to the fasting story right away. Large hazel eyes bulging a little under puffy eyelids. The whites were porcelain, the pupils dilated, although that could be explained by the faintness of the light coming through.
The girl was very pale, but then Irish skin was generally so, especially on redheads, until the weather coarsened it. Now there was an oddity: a very fine, colourless down on the cheeks. […] Anna’s earlobes and lips had a bluish tint to them, and so did the beds of the fingernails. She was chilly to the touch.
Anna is not exactly bursting with health, but then nor is anyone else in the village. She is, however, alive, despite apparently fasting for four months. Is this the result of a miraculous intervention by God, or is someone sneaking food into her?
Lib takes detailed notes, as befits a nurse, and the medical details are beautifully done. Anna’s pulse rate and breathing speed up just a bit each day. She takes a few teaspoons of water. She is easily tired, but an ardent believer who will spend all day on her rosary reciting prayers if possible.
This is a quietly paced novel with a great sense of atmosphere. The damp, cold, dreary village. The cottage with beaten-earth floors, mud walls, and flour-sack curtains separating one area from another. The daily routine: washing on Monday, drying (often subverted by the frequent rain), ironing to actually dry the clothes, porridge and oatcakes cooked over the open fire. Despite the worsening condition of Anna, the tone is not taut, exactly, but slow and oddly peaceful. It reflects the tedium of nursing.
The novel is written entirely from Lib’s perspective, and follows all her inner thoughts, including those that show her in a less than pleasant light. She can be sharp, critical, judgemental and dismissive, and there is no one, apart from Anna, that she warms to. Until the advent of a white-knight journalist, William Byrne. The inevitable romance was rather distracting and unnecessary.
Ethically speaking, Lib is in a difficult position. Her job is to watch, but should she force-feed a child who is clearly dying? She is reluctant:
The very idea of terrorizing a delicate child with tubes…
Lib made herself picture the procedure: holding Anna down, pushing a tube down her throat, and dosing her. […] “I don’t think I could. It’s not a matter of squeamishness.”
[..] She couldn’t explain.
Lib is a tough, determined person focused on Anna’s well-being, but she decides that force-feeding will ‘crack Anna’s spirit’. I found this a little hard to believe.
Emma Donoghue has written several novels, the most celebrated (justly) being Room. Her historical fiction is also excellent, especially the very timely The Pull of the Stars, which combines factual accuracy with appealing characters and a lovely story arc. (I was less taken by her Frog Music). It is true that her characters can occasionally show fairly modern attitudes, but this only makes them more appealing. And surely, no one can say for sure whether it is impossible that characters of that time and place could have these modern thoughts?
Donoghue often has captivating turns of phrase that create vivid visual images, or provide commentary that is thought-provoking.
Buildings turned different ways, giving one another the cold shoulder.
Ireland, an improvident mother, seemed to ship half her skinny brood abroad.
The Wonder is not, in my opinion, Donoghue’s best, but she is a reliably good writer, and the book holds your interest.
Totally agree with your conclusion. But your review has nevertheless inspired me to try to review one of Donoghue’s too!