Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder:  

a compelling novel with large questions

In her second novel, Emma Donoghue returns to familiar territory:  an innocent child whose worldview has been sharply skewed by evil adults and a young woman who is desperately seeking escape for the child and herself.  In her debut novel, Room, the narrator is five-year old Jack who has spent his entire existence in “Room,” an 11 X 11 shed with steel walls and bars on the one window, a skylight.  Jack is the product of Ma, the young college student who is kidnapped, held and repeatedly raped, and the abductor whom Jack refers to as “Old Nick.”  As Jack grows up, he asks more questions about a world he has never experienced and Ma becomes increasingly determined to figure out how to liberate herself and her child from this nightmare.  Because the novel is seen through Jack’s eyes, the reader is treated to a strange perspective, a world-view that is skewed by limited exposure to other people, nature, and pretty much anything not in the room or in books.

Set in the 1850’s in a small village in Ireland, The Wonder also features a child, 11- year old Anna O’Donnell, the daughter of poor farming parents, who believes that she is living on manna from Heaven.  The word on the street is that Anna has not accepted food or drink in four months – since the day of her confirmation – and a committee of townspeople have hired two nurses to participate in a round-the-clock watch for two weeks to determine the veracity of Anna’s claim and the possibility of a saint in their midst.  The narrator is Lib Wright, a young widow and a nursing disciple of the famous Florence Nightingale whom she frequently quotes when in doubt about what action to take.  She is hired by the committee to pair with an Irish nun who also has a nursing background to rotate through 8- hour shifts for a period of two weeks at the O’Donnell’s cottage.  Lib is a woman of science and immediately views her mission as one of exposure; the child cannot possibly be living without food and Lib is determined to reveal whoever is perpetrating this hoax. She is initially steely and cold in her treatment of the family, desiring to keep a professional distance and casting suspicion on all.  Her initial examination of Anna surprisingly reveals a somewhat healthy child, however there are certain indications that while Anna has probably been eating, she hasn’t gotten enough.

It doesn’t take long for Lib to become fond of her young charge who is inherently cheerful, thoughtful and bright.  At the same time, Lib is troubled by Anna’s resistance to any nourishment and her insistence that her fast is part of “God’s plan.”  The longer Lib is there, the worse Anna’s condition grows and Lib realizes that her very presence must be preventing the secretive feeding that had been taking place.  She becomes increasing desperate to convince others – Anna’s parents, the nun, the village doctor, the village priest, and a Dublin journalist in town to cover the story – that Anna is not a saint, but a starving little girl.  The family and townspeople, however, view Lib as a snobbish, English outsider and are (overly?) eager for her to witness a true miracle in their impoverished backwater. 

There are a number of twists to the story as Lib, part-nurse, part-detective makes discoveries, turning the novel into a mystery of sorts. The situation, seen through her worldly eyes rather than those of Anna, perpetuates the mystery behind the child’s choices and the acquiescence of those around her. Catholicism and religious doctrine do not come off well here.  Lib, for both personal and professional reasons, rejects the “It’s God’s will” beliefs of the fatalistic Irish.  It seems a cop-out to insist on Divine will when it comes to clearly avoidable suffering and death, and Donoghue suggests a certain evil human nature hiding behind a façade of dogma.

At the heart of the novel are some significant questions.  As posed by reviewer Sarah Lyall in her September 16, 2016 review of the novel in the New York Times: What does it mean to give up the most basic human need in the service of something greater than yourself? Is it an admirable stand, or an abomination? And if you’re an outsider presiding over someone not-eating himself into oblivion, do you have the right, or the obligation, to intervene?  As with Room, The Wonder is about moral responsibility for someone other than yourself, and the courage it takes against great odds to protect another.